科学家绘制了整个老鼠大脑的地图，结果令人着迷

科学家绘制了整个老鼠大脑的地图，结果令人着迷

You probably don’t think about mice all that often. If you have a few of them running around your house or apartment, that’s another story, but the modern mouse plays a larger role in your life than you may know. Mice are the test subjects of the scientific world, and whether they (or we) like it or not, countless drugs and treatments eventually made it to store shelves and pharmacy counters thanks to early testing conducted on tiny little mice.

你可能不会经常想到老鼠。如果有一些老鼠在你的房子或公寓里跑来跑去，那就另当别论了，但是现代老鼠在你的生活中扮演着比你想象中更重要的角色。老鼠是科学界的试验对象，不管他们(或我们)喜不喜欢，无数的药物和治疗方法最终通过对小老鼠的早期试验，最终走上货架和药房柜台。

Lab mice are bred specifically for the purpose of testing, and they are often the first animals to feel the effects of drugs used to treat everything from Alzheimer’s to back pain and everything in between. With that in mind, it makes sense that researchers would want to know as much about mouse brains as possible, and a three-year project just resulted in the most complete atlas of a mouse brain ever created.

实验鼠是专门为测试而培育的，它们通常是首批感受到用于治疗从阿尔茨海默氏病到背痛以及介于两者之间的所有药物的药物的动物。考虑到这一点，研究人员希望尽可能多地了解老鼠大脑是有道理的，一个为期三年的项目刚刚产生了有史以来最完整的老鼠大脑图谱。

The incredible amount of work that went into mapping every nook and cranny of the mouse brain is the subject of a new paper published in the journal Cell. The result of that work is a richly detailed 3D model that other scientists can use in their own research efforts. Every piece of the virtual brain model is labeled, with coordinates making it easy to explore its intricacies.

一篇发表在《细胞》杂志上的新论文指出，在绘制老鼠大脑每一个角落和缝隙的地图方面所做的大量工作令人难以置信。这项工作的结果是一个丰富详细的三维模型，其他科学家可以在自己的研究工作中使用。虚拟大脑模型的每一个部分都有标签，坐标使探索其复杂性变得容易。

“The atlas was a really necessary resource that enabled the very idea of doing studies at the brain-wide level,” Nick Steinmetz, Ph.D., a scientist who recently used the mouse brain atlas for his own research, said in a statement. “When you’re recording from hundreds of sites across the brain, that introduces a new scale of investigation. You have to have a bigger view of where all the recording sites are, and the [Common Coordinate Framework] is what made that possible.”

最近将小鼠脑图谱用于自己的研究的科学家尼克·斯坦梅茨博士在一份声明中说：“该图谱是一种非常必要的资源，它使我们有了在全脑水平上进行研究的想法。”。“当你从大脑中的数百个地点进行记录时，这就引入了一种新的调查尺度。您必须对所有记录点的位置有一个更大的了解，而[共同的坐标框架][Common Coordinate Framework]使之成为可能。”