University of California San Diego is organizing a collectively-created visual model of the mouse brain. Open up, Mickey, it's time to see what's inside.
It may sound like the premise for the next roller coaster ride at Disney Land, but UC San Diego is serious about letting you take a virtual voyage through the brain of a mouse. Their new open source resource, called the Whole Brain Catalog, allows scientists to navigate through a visual model of a mouse brain. Not only that, but each research team can also upload their latest results helping to improve the accuracy of the WBC overtime. UCSD hopes that their new creation will prove to be a valuable utility for scientists all over the world. Watch a brief demo of the catalog in the video after the break.
Much like MIT’s Registry for Standard Biological Parts, or even Google Earth, the Whole Brain Catalog hopes to build off of collective knowledge. Individual research groups contributing to a central repository of information is going to change the way the scientific community works. In the short term, teams around the world will have access to a visual model of the brain that is used most often in their labs. In the long term, the success of WBC could help usher in a new era of the rapid exchange of scientific information. The quicker that researchers can share their results, the faster other teams can benefit from them, and the sooner we will all enjoy the technological innovations they create.
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