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Researchers have built a high-resolution brain-cell atlas that could do for neuroscience what the Human Genome Project did for genetics. By charting over 25 million individual brain cells across humans, macaques and marmosets, a team of neuroscientists, computational biologists and software engineers across 55 institutions, including Princeton, produced a cellular roadmap of the basal ganglia, a deep-seated network of brain regions that aid movement, habit formation and decision-making.

"It's kind of like the Human Genome Project 1.0, or 0.1," said Fenna Krienen, assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University and a co-investigator in one of the founding consortia of the National Institutes of Health's BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN), the network behind the atlas.

"You had the first kind-of-complete thing, and then all the work that happened after that could map to that reference. That's what we were able to really achieve as part of BICAN."

The consortium chose the basal ganglia in part for its relevance to Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases, Krienen said, and because the region spans parts of the brain with different developmental and evolutionary histories. "With one circuit, we can traverse those different axes," she said.

Now that the technical proof of principle is complete, the BICAN team will continue to map the rest of the brain across humans and other primates, in hopes of creating an entire brain-cell atlas for humans, macaques and marmosets.

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