Scientists Create Wiring Diagram for Mouse Brain

Scientists have created a detailed, three-dimensional wiring diagram of the mouse brain. That should help researchers seek clues about how the human brain works in health and disease.

It's the first brain-wide wiring diagram for a mammal at such a level of detail. While it doesn't reveal every connection between each of the rodent's 75 million brain cells, it shows how parts of the brain are connected.

The work was described online Wednesday in the journal Nature by Hongkui Zeng and colleagues at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.

To create the diagram, scientists combined data from more than 1,000 mouse brains, each of which was divided into 140 slices.