Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg 69120, Germany.
Nat Rev Neurosci. 2012 Feb 22;13(5):351-8. doi: 10.1038/nrn3169.
High-resolution, comprehensive structural information is often the final arbiter between competing mechanistic models of biological processes, and can serve as inspiration for new hypotheses. In molecular biology, definitive structural data at atomic resolution are available for many macromolecules; however, information about the structure of the brain is much less complete, both in scope and resolution. Several technical developments over the past decade, such as serial block-face electron microscopy and trans-synaptic viral tracing, have made the structural biology of neural circuits conceivable: we may be able to obtain the structural information needed to reconstruct the network of cellular connections for large parts of, or even an entire, mouse brain within a decade or so. Given that the brain's algorithms are ultimately encoded by this network, knowing where all of these connections are should, at the very least, provide the data needed to distinguish between models of neural computation.
高分辨率、全面的结构信息通常是生物过程竞争机制模型的最终裁决者,并且可以为新的假说提供灵感。在分子生物学中,许多大分子的原子分辨率的明确结构数据已经可用;然而,关于大脑结构的信息无论是在范围还是分辨率上都要差得多。过去十年中的一些技术发展,如连续块面电子显微镜和跨突触病毒示踪,使得神经回路的结构生物学变得可行:我们也许能够在十年左右的时间内获得重建大脑大部分甚至整个部分的细胞连接网络所需的结构信息。鉴于大脑的算法最终是由这个网络编码的,了解所有这些连接的位置至少应该提供区分神经计算模型所需的数据。