Multi-feature, Multi-scale Atlas

SUMMARY / ABSTRACT ? Project 1.

Multi-feature, Multi-scale Atlas Project 1 of the Berghia Brain Project is to create a multi-scale, multi-feature atlas of the Berghia brain and peripheral neural plexus.

Berghia has a brain that is both physically small enough to be serially sectioned and reconstructed from electron micrographs and also has few enough neurons that they can be individually characterized and catalogued.

Developing the tools for this undertaking will aid in the long term goal of the BRAIN Initiative to fully map the human brain.

The Berghia brain atlas will contain the connectivity, neuroanatomy, and gene expression profile of individual neurons in the brain. It will also feature how those central neurons connect to neurons in periphery and to end organs. The peripheral plexus itself will be characterized and mapped. This will aid in understanding how a brain and a distributed periphery interact.

The atlas will be used to trace out the somatosensory, olfactory, and visual systems to test fundamental models of how these systems are organized. This project will determine whether somatotopic maps are present in the brain. It will also determine how an olfactory system is organized without glomeruli.

Finally, it will examine the distributed, multi-sensory nature of vision.