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Developing human brain tissue containing rosette structures (pink and blue) surrounded by neurons (green).Credit: Nano et al.\/Nature Neurosci.; Jose Soto\/Bhaduri Lab\/UCLA<\/p>\n
Scientists have created the most detailed maps yet of how our brains differentiate from stem cells during embryonic development and early life. In a Nature collection<\/a> including five papers published yesterday, researchers tracked hundreds of thousands of early brain cells in the cortices of humans and mice, and captured with unprecedented precision the molecular events that give rise to a mixture of neurons and supporting cells.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really the initial first draft of any \u2018cell atlases\u2019 for the developing brain,\u201d says Hongkui Zeng, executive vice-president director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, and a co-author of two papers in the collection.<\/p>\n Biggest brain map ever details huge number of neurons and their activity<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n These atlases could offer new ways to study neurological conditions such as autism and schizophrenia. Researchers can now \u201cmine the data, find genes that may be critical for a particular event in a particular cell type and at a particular time point\u201d, says Zeng. \u201cWe have a very exciting time coming,\u201d adds Zolt\u00e1n Moln\u00e1r, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, who was not involved with any of the studies.<\/p>\n The work is part of the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) \u2014 a project launched in 2022 by the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative at the US National Institutes of Health with US$500 million in funding to build reference maps of mammalian brains.<\/p>\n Patterns of development<\/p>\n Two of the papers map parts of the mouse cerebral cortex \u2014 the area of the brain involved in cognitive functions and perception. <\/p>\n Zeng and her colleagues focused on how the visual cortex develops from 11.5-day-old embryos to 56-day-old mice. They created an atlas of 568,654 individual cells and identified 148 cell clusters and 714 subtypes1<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s the first complete high-resolution atlas of the cortical development, including both prenatal and postnatal\u201d phases, says Zeng.<\/p>\n One surprise, she says, was how many neurons continued to take up specialized identities after birth, particularly between day 11, when newborn mice open their eyes for the first time, to day 21.<\/p>\n Another study focused on brain development in human fetuses. How different types of brain cell emerge \u201cis a long-standing question in developmental neurobiology\u201d, says Tomasz Nowakowski, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. He and his colleagues created a family tree map of human cortical cells2<\/a> using brain tissue collected from eight human fetuses at various stages of development.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/d41586-025-03641-0_50851088.jpg\"\/)
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