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The consortium will build on arduous efforts to map punier brains. Over the past decade, researchers have compiled complete atlases of the fruit fly and zebrafish brains at the level of individual cells and circuits. In December 2023, Zeng and dozens of colleagues unveiled an atlas of the mouse brain transcriptome, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) BRAIN Initiative. She predicts that the mouse connectome—the complete wiring diagram of cells’ projections and synapses—is “achievable within 5 to 10 years.”
Yet a marmoset’s brain, half the size of a walnut, has twice as many cells as a mouse’s: more than 1 billion neurons and glial cells. A macaque’s brain, the size of an avocado, has about 13 billion total cells, and our grapefruit-size brains another order of magnitude more. “No single institute or nation can comprehensively map the primate brain at the required scale,” says ICPBM member Dong Won Kim, a neuroscientist at Aarhus University. “Pooling expertise, technologies, and data is probably the only realistic way to achieve this in a reasonable timescale.”