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15.3

Brain Blueprints

The human brain is certainly the most complex object we can study with bioinformatics.

Certainly, this is a kind of “moon landing” that we still have to do in this century: to under­

stand what our consciousness actually is. But of course there are plenty of other tasks (see

previous and next chapter to define other “big goals”). However, a recurrently quite suc­

cessful strategy in bioinformatics is to start “small”. What if one could understand the

brain of a small organism perfectly, in its entire blueprint? And what if you could disclose

the blueprint and put it on the web worldwide, as “open source” software, so to speak?

That is exactly what has already happened.

Here is the link to the rotifer brain blueprint: https://www.openconnectomeproject.org.

The infobox shows details of the entry page on the Internet.

This is the so-called “Open Connectome” project of C. elegans. Here we know “every­

thing”, so to speak. How every neuron in C. elegans is connected to every other neuron?

And the next most complicated brains are currently being worked on in terms of a model,

a circuit diagram, for example for ants and mice. Even for humans there is already the

Brain Activity Atlas and the SMART computing pipeline charted the rhesus monkey brain

at micrometer resolution (Xu et al. 2021) – these are exciting times for bioinformatics.

With the help of the “connectome”, i.e. the wiring diagram for all neurons in C. ele­

gans, it is possible to understand how the nervous system of a simple animal works. In

C. elegans, there are only exactly 302 neurons in each animal, but 118 classes of neuron

types. This is why, in addition to the open-connectome-in-silico modelling project, there is

also the Worm Atlas (see infobox). This is also a growing area of bioinformatics. In addi­

tion to the digital anatomy atlas, the hippocampus region with detailed circuit diagram and

the detection of neuroactivity are shown here.

Brain Blueprints in Computer Models

The link to the entry-level “Open Connectome” project of C. elegans can be found

at: https://www.openconnectomeproject.org. For C. elegans there is also the

WormAtlas (https://www.wormatlas.org/) or WormWiring (https://wormwir­

ing.org/).

Links to the projects for the next most complicated brains can be found here:

Insects: Virtual Insect Brain Lab (https://www.neurofly.de/).

Mouse: Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas (https://mouse.brain-­map.org/

static/atlas).

Human: Brain Activity Atlas (https://www.brainactivityatlas.org/).

15.3  Brain Blueprints