Brain complexity: six new cell types found (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, December 04, 2015, 20:46 (3277 days ago) @ David Turell

As if it couldn't get more complex, it is:-http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a18339/new-kinds-of-brain-cells/-"Today a team of neuroscientists led by Xiaolong Jiang and Andreas Tolias at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston announced six altogether new types of brain cells. The neuroscientists came across these new neurons while conducting a census of brain cells in adult mice in a part of the brain called the the primary visual cortex, an area chiefly concerned with sight. The researchers credit their new insight to a recently developed method of slicing razor-thin slices of mature brain.-***-"Most previous studies investigating the odd menagerie of brain cells have used juvenile mice, mostly because it's easier to get high-resolution pictures of their brains. But there's a problem: Brains keep maturing and complicating as they get older, and Jiang's team believes that their new-found neurons might not form until adulthood. -***-"In their study, Jiang and his colleagues meticulously surveyed 11,000 neurons in three layers of the primary visual cortex in adult mice.? All told, they found 15 types of neurons, six of which had never before been seen or described. The neuroscientists used a complex recoding method called octuple patch-clamp recordings—a way of tracking the many connections brain cells form with one another, all at the same time.-***-"Although we call them all neurons, your brain has an enormous menagerie of brain cells. Even if we ignore the specialized neurons that attach to our muscles or sensory organs like our eyes and tongue (and forget our brains' helpful support cells, called glial cells) mammals like mice or humans are thought to have in excess of hundreds of flavors of so-called interneurons—brain cells that just connect with other brain cells. And today's six new neurons fall in this class.?-***
"'Our brains contain billions of neurons linked through trillions of synaptic connections. Obviously, we are faced with a problem of immense complexity," explains Tolias. "However, if neurons can be classified into distinct cell types... and if we understand [their underlying] rules, it will be an important step in deciphering the wiring of the brain," he says.?-***-"'And we can safely say that there a plenty more cell types to be discovered, throughout the brain in both mice and humans. We only studied a few layers in the visual cortex of a mouse, even just in other parts of that same cortex, there could be many more cell types waiting to be discovered," says Tolias."-Comment: As Tolias anticipates?, further study will only find more complexity, and the same can be said for the layers of the genome controls. Keeps looking more an more like design.