The Brain Wikipedia - Scientists Launch Open-Access Neuron Database

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-04-09

Summary:

e human brain is one of the biggest and most intriguing mysteries scientists are tackling. It’s an incredibly active, bustling place that keeps us going and effectively makes us the people we are. There are about 100 billion neurons processing and transmitting information through electrical and chemical signals and to make things even more complicated, each of these neurons has about 10,000 different connections to neighboring brain cells. Needless to say, mapping and understanding all these neurons and connections is a gargantuan task – that’s why computer scientists and biologists from Carnegie Mellon University in the US have created an open-access database indexing all the known physiological information about neurons ... Basically, they’ve developed a wiki-like system called NeuroElectro (website here) ... I took a look at the website, and I have to say, it’s a fantastic achievement. The design is pleasant, information is easy to access (if you know what you’re looking for), and speaking of information – there’s a LOT of it. The roughly 300 types of neurons are arranged, discussed and presented in an almost exhaustive fashion. The database was created by computational neuroscientist, Shreejoy J. Tripathy, from the University of British Columbia in Canada, who analyzed almost 10,000 published papers describing how neurons react to various inputs. He then used text-mining algorithms to ‘read’ each of the papers, retrieving information on how they function, how they respond, and how the data was gathered ..."

Link:

http://www.zmescience.com/science/neurology-science/neuron-database-06042015/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.neuro oa.databases oa.tools oa.neuroelectro oa.open_science

Date tagged:

04/09/2015, 11:23

Date published:

04/09/2015, 07:23