Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen seems intent on living the dreams of every geeky teenage boy — building museums of rock ‘n’ roll and sci-fi, buying up sports teams, and funding commercial space flight. And like the Health Blog in our own geeky adolescence, Allen apparently thinks the brain is really, really cool.
The Allen Institute for Brain Science is expected to say today that it’s launching a four-year, $55 million project to build an atlas of genes’ activity in the brain.
The endeavor is basic science, with no immediate clinical impact. But it could produce a useful tool kit for researchers trying to untangle the biology of a wide range of psychiatric and neurological diseases, Allan Jones, the institute’s chief scientific officer, told us on a recent visit. The atlas should build on current research linking various genes to illnesses of the brain by showing where the relevant genes are most active.
That project could lead to some unexpected findings. “Everybody says schizophrenia has to be in the prefrontal cortex,” he said by way of example. “Maybe they’re wrong.”
Jones and his colleagues will take about a half dozen brains from recently dead people who were neurologically and psychiatrically healthy. Then they’ll divide each brain into somewhere between 500 and 2000 regions, and look at what genes were turned on in each region. (Geeky bonus: They’ll do this by looking for mRNA, the genetic material that turns genes into proteins.) About 100,000 different proteins are expressed in the brain, Allen said.
Extrapolating findings from dead brains to live ones does require some work-arounds. Certain genes are expressed like crazy when the brain’s starved for oxygen, so they tend to show unusually high activity at the time of death and in cadaver brains. But the mRNA expressed by many key genes persists long enough that their location in the cadavers should reflect healthy brain function, Jones said.
The project builds on the Institute’s signature accomplishment to date, an online atlas of the mouse brain that shows which genes are turned on and off in which parts of the brain.
The human project is going to be trickier. But the difference between what’s inside your cranium and a mouse’s brain may be less than you think. “The complexity is likely to be the same,” Allen said.