Neuroscience

Professor Joseph Ecker, Research Professor Margarita Behrens, co-first authors Jingtian Zhou and Wei Tian, and other Salk colleagues and global collaborators analyzed more than half a million brain cells from three human brains to assemble an atlas of hundreds of cell types that make up a human brain in unprecedented detail. The massive scientific collaboration is a part of the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative, an effort launched in 2014 to describe the full plethora of cells in mammalian brains. More detailed work on a larger number of brains, Ecker says, will pave the way toward a better understanding of how certain brain cell types can malfunction in brain disorders and diseases.

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Each year in the United States there are more than 3 million cases of peripheral neuropathy, wherein nerves outside of the brain and spinal cord are damaged and cause pain and loss of feeling in the affected areas. Professor Samuel Pfaff, first author Lydia Daboussi, and colleagues have now uncovered a mechanism in mice for repairing damaged nerves during peripheral neuropathy. The findings have the potential to inspire novel therapeutics that bolster repair functions and heal peripheral neuropathy caused by diabetes, injury, genetically inherited disease, infection, and more.

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In another NIH BRAIN Initiative collaboration of Salk colleagues and global collaborators, Professors Edward Callaway and Joseph Ecker and Research Professor Margarita Behrens worked together to publish four papers in a special feature in Nature with the goal of revolutionizing scientists’ understanding of the brain. The Salk team analyzed more than 2 million brain cells from mice to assemble the most complete mouse brain atlas ever. Altogether, the full 10-paper package details the thousands of cell types present in the mouse brain, how those cells connect, and which genes and regulatory programs are active in each cell.

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