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Mouse BIRN Projects

Overview

Mouse BIRN (mBIRN) is a research and development effort funded by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) to produce an integrated framework for the collection, analysis, management, and visualization of diverse neuroscience data sets. It provides a test bed for the formulation of hardware, software, and protocols to produce a distributed adaptive database and multiscale, multimodality digital atlases of the mouse brain. These resrouces are used to share and mine multi-scale structural and functional data and integrate these with genomic and gene expression data. The goal is to create an infrastructure that can greatly enhance previously disparate data collections into a single system capable of quantitative visualization and linkage with previously disconnected knowledge bases.

Significance

mBIRN is acquiring complete volumetric coverage with magnetic resonance imaging (MR), cryosections, conventional histology, and gene expression from common specimens along with confocal light microscopy, and electron tomography from closely related specimens. This allows the neuroscientists studying the mouse models the ability to view the complex anatomy of the mouse brain in 3 dimensions at multiple scales for tissue and structure differentiation, along any arbitrary plane, and all from a single computer screen.

Combining these techniques with well characterized mouse models, it becomes much easier to understand the disease mechanism and potential therapies. The development of MR microscopy in mouse models makes transition of imaging studies possible from mouse to human. mBIRN will complete the link making correlation possible between fundamental structural units (e.g., the dendritic spine), gene expression, traditional histology, magnetic resonance histology, and in vivo MR imaging. The products of mBIRN, including the initial data sets for these models, the tools for comparison, the infrastructure for sharing the data and the knowledge base, will all clearly be extensible to a much broader community as scientists seek to connect an exponentially increasing number of mouse models to human disease.

Individual projects

MouseBIRN Individual Projects
More information about some of the current mouse BIRN projects

Attachment sort Action Size Date Who Comment
overview.pdf manage 261.3 K 11 May 2005 - 00:19 MiraeYang OVERVIEW OF THE BIRN PROJECT