Delft researchers helped map the cortex
Hundreds of neuroscientists and data experts, amongst whom researchers from TU Delft, built a ‘parts list’ of the motor cortex that controls movement, laying groundwork to map the whole brain and better understand brain diseases.
The researchers were brought together by the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. They described their so-called brain atlas in a special package of 17 articles published earlier this month in the journal Nature.
In one of the papers, with Delft researchers as co-authors, the relationship is described between gene expression, regulation and the DNA 3D structure of 300 thousand individual brain cells. “We created a kind of cellular periodic table”, says biomedical imaging professor Boudewijn Lelieveldt (affiliated with the EEMCS Faculty and Leiden University Medical Center). His team made a key contribution in the field of data visualization by developing the Cytosplore Viewer, a computer program that helped link different types of information for individual brain cells. Nature prominently highlighted the Cytosplore Viewer on the ‘online landing page’ of the special issue.
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