Science Together

This ground-breaking package from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) consortium brings us closer to understanding how the a handful of cells transform into a complex organ that powers thought, emotion, and behavior. It’s the result of a massive scientific collaboration spanning multiple institutions and disciplines, aimed at mapping brain development in extraordinary detail.

The current collection of papers from BICCN researchers reports the first complete cell type atlas of a mammalian brain, with over 30 million cells profiled from the adult mouse brain using a combination of single-cell transcriptomic, epigenomic, and spatial transcriptomic approaches, identifying over 5,300 cell types in the entire mouse brain. These studies achieve brain-wide cross-modality integration between transcriptomic profiles and epigenomic, spatial, or connectional properties, as well as certain aspects of evolutionary conservation and divergence, and uncover multitudes of organizing principles of the extraordinary cell type diversity across the brain.

With over 100 billion neurons in the human brain, understanding the cellular diversity and differences between human and non-human primate (NHP) brain will lay a key foundation for future brain and disease research. This curated collection of studies is dedicated to deciphering the nuanced gene expression by species and age and functional and anatomical properties that delineate these cell types.

A multimodal cell census and atlas of the mammalian primary motor cortex (MOp or M1) was achieved as the initial product of the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN). Coordinated large-scale analyses of single-cell transcriptomes, chromatin accessibility, DNA methylomes, spatially resolved single-cell transcriptomes, morphological and electrophysiological properties, and cellular resolution input-output mapping, integrated through cross-modal computational analysis.