Paul Allen Project on Genetic Map

Multibillionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen had a spare 100 million U.S. dollars to throw around in 2002 and decided a good project would be to make a genetic map of the mouse brain. Tuesday the Allen Brain Atlas was officially declared finished.


The 3-D reference developed by the Allen Institute for Brain Science offers information on 3,000 active genes in the mouse brain. The map is featured for free online at www.alleninstitute.org.

"Ever since I grew up in Seattle as a kid, I was fascinated by science," Allen said in a Reuters interview. "You realize that computers take a very simplistic approach to computing things. The next set of research we are going to do is focus on the neocortex (human brain) - the area where most higher function occurs."

"Since mice and humans share more than 90 percent of genes, the Allen Brain Atlas has enormous potential for understanding human neurological diseases and disorders affecting more than 50 million Americans each year," the institute said in a statement.

These include Alzheimer's disease, which affects 4.5 million Americans, autism, which may occur in one in every 175 births, epilepsy, which affects 2.7 million Americans, schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease.

The atlas was produced using in situ hybridisation, a technique that uses a chemical marker such as a jellyfish fluorescence gene to show whether a gene is active.

Tissue containing cells expressing each active gene was stained, photographed and the pictures uploaded to the website.

In four years, scientists working for the Atlas project have mapped more than 21,000 genes. They then checked each gene to see which ones are turned on - expressed - in brain tissue.

Each cell in an organism's body carries all the genes, but not all of them are expressed, or active. Gene expression is what determines each cell's type and function.

Allen's team found that more than 80 percent of the genes in the brain are active. They had believed that perhaps 60 or 70 percent were expressed. Enditem