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Neuroscience Cell Types Webinars (2025 + recordings)
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How many brain cell types are there? What is their form, function, and how do they connect? Teams at the Allen Institute for Brain Science are working to answer these foundational neuroscience questions. By cataloguing and genetically profiling cell types of the brain with incredible precision and detail, we are working to improve our fundamental understanding of brain development, evolution, and disease.
Join us for a webinar series to learn from Allen Institute scientists and collaborators about various cell types and neuroscience projects.
Register for the webinar you are interested in attending. The series can be watched either sequentially or individually. You will get a reminder email closer to the date along with information on how to join the webinar online. For questions or assistance, please contact education@alleninstitute.org.
This webinar series was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health under Award…
This webinar series was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number U24NS133077. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Learn more about the series and register: https://alleninstitute.org/events/neuroscience-cell-types-webinars/
Upcoming Webinars
Mapping the cellular architecture of the mammalian basal ganglia | Dec. 2, 2025, 9:00 AM Pacific Time
New cellular advances allow us to map basal ganglia’s structure and function in both humans and model organisms. We will present major advances by the Human and Mammalian Brain Atlas group (part of BICAN) on basal ganglia mapping—including cross-species cellular mapping and open-access visualization tools.
New Frontiers in Understanding Brain Development | Dec. 9, 2025, 10-11:30 AM Pacific Time
How does the brain build itself? What sparks the transformation from a handful of cells into a complex organ that powers thought, emotion, and behavior? We will present the findings from 12 coordinated papers aimed at mapping brain development in extraordinary detail.
Exploring the New Brain Knowledge Platform | Jan. 14, 2026, 11-12 PM Pacific Time
This webinar will highlight new features and data in the Brain Knowledge Platform.
Getting Started with Programmatic Access to ABC Atlas Data | Feb. 11, 2026, 10-11 AM Pacific Time
This beginner-friendly webinar will focus on installation, set-up, and common questions related to using Jupyter notebooks (Python) for accessing and analyzing ABC Atlas transcriptomic data.
Previous Webinars
Cell Types 101
This webinar will feature an introduction to the study of cell types! We will cover evolving cell type definitions, cell types across species, the types of data used to define cell types, and the importance of having standard definitions for cell types. This will be a great starting point for those who are new to cell types, and refresher for the experts.
Recording of this webinar is available on our YouTube channel here.
What is a taxonomy?
This webinar will focus on the systematic classification of cell types and their hierarchical relationships. Much like species taxonomy (family, genus, species, etc.), researchers at the Allen Institute and their collaborators are working to create a standard taxonomy for cell types.
Recording of this webinar is available on our YouTube channel here
PatchSeq: The techniques behind the Cell Type Knowledge Explorer
This webinar will focus on the Cell Type Knowledge Explorer, a cell type taxonomy tool created by the Allen Institute and their collaborators. Here we will learn how transcriptomic, morphological, and electrophysiological data is generated and used to define cell types in the CTKE.
Recording of this webinar is available on our YouTube channel here.
Cross-species cell types
This webinar will also focus on the Cell Type Knowledge Explorer, a cell type taxonomy tool created by the Allen Institute and their collaborators. Here we will learn how multimodal data is used in the CTKE to determine cell type homologies across species (mouse, human, and marmoset) in the primary motor cortex.
Recording of this webinar is available on our YouTube channel here.
What is your cell type: MapMyCells
This webinar will focus on MapMyCells, a new interactive cell type taxonomy tool. MapMyCells allows for users to upload their own cell type data and compare it to taxonomy datasets generated by the Allen Institute and their collaborators.
Recording of this webinar is available on our YouTube channel here
Introduction to ABC Atlas
This webinar will focus on the Allen Brain Cell (ABC) Atlas, a platform for visualizing single cell transcriptomic data in the brain. Currently, the atlas features spatial, non-spatial, human, and mouse data; this webinar will be an introduction to and a general overview of the atlas.
Recording of this webinar is available on our YouTube channel here
Spatial Transcriptomics: How Team Science Created the ABC Atlas
This webinar will focus on how the Allen Institute uses team science to tackle large-scale projects. We will focus on the teams involved in our spatial transcriptomics pipeline and the journey that cells take, all the way from our histology lab to being featured online in tools such as the ABC Atlas.
MapMySpikes Data Challenge
This webinar will feature an introduction to our previous data challenge MapMySpikes, where participants were challenged to map cell types onto Allen Institute transcriptomic taxonomies using electrophysiological data, and a talk given by our data challenge winner featuring their winning tool.
The Annotation Comparison Explorer
This webinar will focus on the Annotation Comparison Explorer (ACE), a new tool for comparing annotations across Allen Institute transcriptomic taxonomies. This tool can also be used to compare annotations across transcriptomic cell types from Alzheimer’s Disease studies as well.
All About Single Cell/Nucleus Transcriptomics | Jan 22, 2025
This webinar will be an introduction to single cell transcriptomics, how this technique is used at the Allen Institute, and how “single cell” transcriptomics compares to “single nucleus”.
The Seattle Alzheimer's Disease Brain Cell Atlas | Feb 12, 2025
This webinar will focus on The Seattle Alzheimer’s Disease Brain Cell Atlas (SEA-AD), featuring some of the scientists behind the project. The goal of the SEA-AD Atlas is to characterize the cellular and molecular changes that occur during the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, using single nucleus– and spatial transcriptomics and other techniques.
Programmatic Access to ABC Atlas Data | March 26, 2025
This webinar will focus on using Allen Institute Jupyter notebooks to access datasets featured in the ABC Atlas, such as the whole mouse brain single cell transcriptomics dataset.
Learn more about the series and register: https://alleninstitute.org/events/cell_type_az_webinars/
