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Scaling up neuroscience

Nature Neuroscience volume 7, page 425 (2004)Cite this article

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In the foreword to Discovering the Brain, James Watson wrote, “the brain is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.” Obviously to understand brain function, we need to confront its complexity. Various strategies have been proposed to address this issue, but one view is that the way forward is to obtain vast amounts of data characterizing the brain. Gathering the data is only the first step on this path, however; effectively mining this information and interpreting it are as difficult, and as crucial.

Following the success of large-scale efforts in molecular biology, efforts to 'scale up' data production and analysis in neuroscience are beginning to escalate. In this issue, we present a focus consisting of nine Perspective articles that highlight the use of high-throughput methodologies in neuroscience, and discuss their current progress and future challenges. This format is a type of review intended for scholarly presentation of a particular viewpoint. For this young field, in which consensus views of the community have not yet emerged in most cases, a collection of Perspectives seemed most appropriate to us.

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    Kalyani Narasimhan

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  1. Kalyani Narasimhan
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Narasimhan, K. Scaling up neuroscience. Nat Neurosci 7, 425 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0504-425

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