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Impossible challenge?
Mapping the brain in this way had long been thought an impossible challenge. Molecular biologist Francis Crick, who won the Nobel prize for describing the structure of DNA, suggested neuroscientists would never be able to achieve such a detailed understanding of the brain.
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“It is no use asking for the impossible, such as, say, the exact wiring diagram for a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and the way all its neurons are firing,” he wrote in Scientific American in 1979.

The mouse brain “connectome” builds on similar work on even smaller creatures: The connectome of the nematode worm C. elegans was completed in 2019, and scientists revealed a map of all the fruit fly brain neurons in 2024.

One cubic millimeter of mouse brain is about 20 times bigger than the complete fruit fly brain, and much more complex, the researchers said. Nonetheless, the goal is to be able to map the entire mice brain connectome in the near future.

“I think right now the answer is no, it is not feasible, but I think everyone has really clear ideas about how they could break through those barriers. We’re hoping in three or four years, we can say, yes, it is possible,” Collman told CNN.

However, he said mapping the human brain connectome in similar synaptic resolution would be a dramatically more difficult endeavor. “The human brain is another factor of 1,500 or so larger than a mouse brain, and so that brings a whole host … of technical and ethical barriers to doing that,” he said.

However, it might be possible to trace axons throughout the human brain, if not synaptic connections, added Dr. Clay Reid, a senior investigator in brain science at the Allen Institute.

“The prospect of reconstructing the entire human brain at the level of all of the connections, that’s something for the distant future.”

A new way to study Alzheimer’s
The 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.

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