A team of Chinese scientists, working alongside international researchers, has achieved a groundbreaking milestone in brain mapping. They published ten seminal studies on mesoscale brain atlases in leading Cell Press journals on Thursday.
The research aims to decode the neural network basis underlying perception, movement, learning, memory, and decision-making by constructing precise “brain maps.” These maps enable accurate localization of various types of neural cells and their network connectivity patterns.
“Our research has successfully extended brain mapping from rodents to primates,” said Muming Poo, scientific director of the Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CEBSIT). “Primate brains are significantly more complex than those of rodents.”
The team integrated advanced high-resolution brain imaging, spatial transcriptomic analysis, and AI technologies to construct comprehensive mesoscale brain atlases covering multiple species at single-cell resolution. This represents a crucial milestone in understanding brain cell types, neural connectivity patterns, developmental and evolutionary characteristics, as well as molecular mechanisms of brain disorders in macaques and other species.
“These achievements depended on several innovations in brain mapping technologies developed in our participating Chinese institutions,” said Sun Yangang, a leading investigator at CEBSIT. “These include advances in single-cell spatial transcriptomics of large tissue samples of the primate brain and high-throughput 3D reconstructions of axon morphologies.”
The series of studies were accomplished by over 300 scientists from various Chinese research institutions, including CEBSIT, Suzhou Institute for Brainsmatics under the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, BGI Research Institute, as well as collaborators from France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
“Primate brain mapping research requires a long time for data acquisition and involves a staggering volume of data to be stored and analyzed,” Poo added. “We call for sustained global scientific collaboration to collectively advance toward the ambitious goal of deciphering the mesoscale brain atlases of primate brains, including the human brain.”
