A new way to study Alzheimer’s swellThe neocortex is particularly interesting to study, because this region of the brain is what distinguishes mammal brains from those of other vertebrates, said Dr. Mariela Petkova, a research associate, and Dr. Gregor Schuhknecht, a postdoctoral fellow, both in the department of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University. Petkova and Schuhknecht weren’t involved in the creation of the mouse brain map.“The researchers focused on this region because it is generally considered to be the seat of higher cognition and plays a key part in sensory perception, language processing, planning and decision-making,” they wrote in an article published alongside the research.“Remarkably, these seemingly different functions are made possible by a blueprint that can be found, with some modifications, in all cortical areas and in all mammals.”Lab mice are already widely used to understand human diseases, and a better comprehension of the mouse brain’s form and function will present new possibilities for studying human brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism and schizophrenia that involve disruptions in neural communication.“If you have a broken radio and you have the circuit diagram, you’ll be in a better position to fix it,” da Costa said in a news release. “We are describing a kind of Google map or blueprint of this grain of sand. In the future, we can use this to compare the brain wiring in a healthy mouse to the brain wiring in a model of disease.”
No answers yet