Scientists hit major milestone in whole-brain circuit mapping project

Neurosciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) reached an important milestone today, publicly releasing the first installment out of 500 TB of data so far collected in their path breaking project to construct the first whole-brain wiring diagram of a vertebrate brain, that of the mouse.
   
The data consist of gigapixel images (each close to 1 billion pixels) of whole-brain sections that can be zoomed to show individual neurons and their processes, providing a "virtual microscope." The images are integrated with other data sources from the web, and are being made fully accessible to neurosciences as well as interested members of the general public (http://mouse.brainarchitecture.org). The data are being released per-publication in the spirit of open science initiatives that have become familiar in digital astronomy (e.g., Sloan Digital Sky Survey) but are not yet as widespread in neurobiology.