The most
significant event since the publication of the previous edition has been the sequencing
of the mouse and human genomes, opening up new horizons for all of biology. For
the brain, interpreting the functions of the genes depends on understanding how
the proteins they produce function at different sites within a nerve cell, and
how each nerve cell contributes to the circuits that carry out the fundamental
operations of processing information in each brain region. This is the subject
matter of synaptic organization.
Taking advantage
of the genomic and proteomic data are new methods, including new applications
of patch clamp recordings, powerful new microscopic methods based on two-photon
laser confocal microscopy, gene-targeting to enable specific genes and proteins
to be labeled, knocked-in or knocked-out, and fluorescent methods that provide dramatic
images of cells as they interact synaptically with their neighbors under a
variety of different functional states. Previously remote problems, such as the
functions of dendrites and dendritic spines, are being attacked directly with
the new methods.
In parallel with
the experimental advances have come ever more powerful computational models
that are building a deeper theoretical basis for brain function. Just as more
powerful accelerators give physicists the ability to probe more deeply into the
atom and the fundamental forces that determine the nature of matter and energy,
so the new methods are giving neuroscientists the ability to probe more deeply into
the neuron and its synaptic circuits and the fundamental properties that
determine how information is processed in the brain. The results continue to
constitute a quiet revolution in how we understand the neural basis of
behavior, as potentially profound for brain science as the quantum theory has
been for physics.
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