Thursday, 12 September 2013

The Synaptic organization of the brain; Fifth Edition

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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