(June 19, 2015)
Mapping the human brain’s network of interconnections, known as the
connectome is typically done with help from computational tools because
recreating interconnections between different brain regions has been
challenging in the lab. Researchers at
the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have
developed a method to recreate connections between neurons from two different
brain areas in a dish. Their findings were published in Frontiers in Systems
Neuroscience.
Researchers from OIST's Brain Mechanism for Behaviour Unit,
Neurobiology Research Unit, and Physics and Biology Unit collaborated on this
study. The study used neurons from embryos of mice. The first connections
between different brain compartments develop at the embryonic stage.