Amazingly Detailed Map Reveals How the Brain Changes with Aging
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Amazingly Detailed Map Reveals How the Brain Changes With Aging:
Last week, in a technological tour-de-force, a European team from the United Kingdom, France, and Sweden, led by Dr. Seth G.N. Grant at the University of Edinburgh, redefined impossibility with a paper in Science. Peering into the brains of mice at different ages-one day, one week, and all the way up to an elderly 18 months-the team constructed maps of roughly 5 billion synapses, outlining a timeline of their diversity and numbers in over 100 different brain regions with age.
[...] In their new study, the team built a time map of synapses in the mouse brain, which they call the lifespan synaptome architecture," or LSA. The project is part of the Mouse Lifespan Synaptome Atlas, which comes with an assortment of tools for researchers to dig into to better understand how our brains age with time.
To build their synaptic timeline, the team analyzed the brain of a type of transgenic mice that have some proteins in their synapses highlighted with a fluorescent protein. The team picked ten points in their lifespan, covering the entire range of newly born to adolescent to adulthood and the elderly.
Journal Reference:
Melissa Cizeron, Zhen Qiu, Babis Koniaris, et al. A brain-wide atlas of synapses across the mouse lifespan [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aba3163)
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