Human and Non-Human Primate Brain Atlases and Tools - Webinar (June 11th, 2024)

The incredible complexity of the human brain poses enormous challenges in understanding how the brain underlies our thoughts and behaviors, and what goes wrong in disease. Furthermore, the inaccessibility of the human brain necessitates the use of closely related model organisms to understand many aspects of brain structure and function that cannot be studied in human. New highly scalable technologies for studying individual cells on the basis of the genes they use are rapidly accelerating the field to create complete maps of the types of cells that make up the brain. These methods also allow mapping of homologous cell types across species to understand what can be studied in model organisms and what is unique about the human brain.

This webinar will present results from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (biccn.org) recently published in Science that describes the first draft of a brain-wide cell atlas of the adult human brain. Based on a single cell RNA sequencing (single cell transcriptomics), this effort describes the exceptional diversity of brain cell types and their distribution across the brain, identifying over 3000 cell types. These cell atlasing efforts have entered the next phase through the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) focused on human and closely related non-human primate model organisms. These new efforts use a combination of single cell transcriptomics, epigenomics and spatial transcriptomics to identify all cell types and map their spatial organization both in local tissue microarchitecture and the larger-scale microarchitecture of the brain.

Finally, these cell atlases are created to be foundational community resources in the spirit of the Human Genome Project. Effective open access tools are essential to realize the potential of these resources to standardize and accelerate efforts across the field to understand brain function and disease. Tools to visualize these data and for users to map their own data against will be described.

Speakers:
03:39 - Ed Lein, Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science: Introduction and Overview

15:20 - Kimberly Siletti - Assistant Professor at the University Medical Center Utrecht
Title of talk: Transcriptomic cell-type diversity across the human brain
Read “Transcriptomic diversity of cell types across the adult human brain” here: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.add7046

24:18 - Rebecca Hodge - Assistant Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain science
Title of talk: Building comprehensive cellular atlases of human and non-human primate brains using single cell genomics
Read "Comparative transcriptomics reveals human-specific cortical features" here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s...
Read: Interindividual variation in human cortical cell type abundance and expression" here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s...
Read "Transcriptomic cytoarchitecture reveals principles of human neocortex organization" here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s...

32:28 - Stephanie Seeman - Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science
Read "Comparative transcriptomics reveals human-specific cortical features" here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s...
Read "Transcriptomic cytoarchitecture reveals principles of human neocortex organization" here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s...

41:30 - Elysha Fiabane - Product Manager at the Allen Institute for Brain Science
Title of talk: Web Tools for Visualizing and Analyzing Human and Mammalian Brain Atlases
Cell Types Knowledge Explorer https://knowledge.brain-map.org/cellt...
ABC Atlas https://portal.brain-map.org/atlases-...
MapMyCells http://knowledge.brain-map.org/mapmyc...

41:30 - Q&A

Moderator:
Jimena Garcia - Program Manager, Inclusive Research at Allen Institute

Read more about HMBA (Human and Mammalian Brain Atlas) efforts, including links to papers and datasets via: https://www.biccn.org/science/human-a... and https://www.portal.brain-bican.org/.

We truly appreciate your engagement with this webinar and look forward to connecting with you again at future events, listed at brain-bican.org/events.

This webinar has been supported by the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) of the National Institutes of Health under the Human and Mammalian Brain Atlas (HMBA) Consortium, award number UM1MH130981. The publications were supported by and coordinated through the BICCN (biccn.org) and BICAN (brain-bican.org).