Congruent to its expansive achievements with AI, novel hardware, and robust cloud computing services, Google has been investing significant resources into an area of science that isn’t as frequently covered by the media: brain connectivity research. This field, formally known as, specifically refers to the study of connections within an organism’s nervous system.
Undoubtedly, connectomics is an incredibly challenging and complex field of science to pursue, given that the scope of the work is microscopic and requires utmost precision and intricacy. However, with advancements in microscopy and novel ways of creating 3d and 4d reconstructions, scientists are finally able to see progress.
Nonetheless, advancements in microscopy also mean that scientists now have an incredible amount of data to analyze, which has become the new rate limiting step in furthering this research. This is where Google’s work really shines, by helping to “solve some of these data analysis problems and thus enable a high-throughput approach to studying the network architecture of the brain.”
Dr. Viren Jain, PhD and Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google leading the connectomics work, explains that this research is critical to truly understanding the nervous system and how synaptic relationships ultimately come together to enable life functions. Moreover, he exclaims that this field is still in its infancy—much like mapping the human genome and the field of genomics was just a few decades ago.
A lot of progress has been made in recent years. The mapping of the adult Drosophila connectome was an incredible feat for the scientific community and brought a lot of attention to this work. As the authors write in this, “In this work, we have achieved a dream of anatomists that is more than a century old.
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