Harvard researchers have mapped and catalogued more than 70,000 synaptic connections from about 2,000 rat neurons, using a silicon chip capable of recording small yet telltale synaptic signals from a large number of neurons.
The research, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, is a major advance in neuronal recording and may help bring scientists a step closer to drawing a detailed synaptic connection map of the brain.
Higher-order brain functions are believed to be derived from the ways brain cells, or neurons, are connected. Neuron-to-neuron contact points are called synapses, and scientists seek to draw synaptic connection maps that show not only which neurons connect to which other neurons, but also how strong each connection is.
While electron…