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Special Issue: Towards multi-modal, multi-species brain atlases

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Neuroanatomy is currently undergoing a resurgence. The increasing availability of high-throughput methods and digitization of new and already existing datasets mean that new maps of brain organization are created and becoming easily accessible to ever more researchers. With this plethora of new maps come new challenges. The new maps often describe data of very different modalities and obtained using very different methods, ranging from gene expression in cortical layers to receptor distributions, connections, morphology, and computation and function. Understanding how these different maps relate to one another (so-called “vertical translation”) presents one of the most exciting developments in neuroanatomy in the last decades. Together with this integration across levels or modalities, there is the comparison between maps of different species (“horizontal translation”). Formal methods for relating maps between species have now been proposed and aim to address issues of homology and to equalize terminology across traditionally separated subfields of neuroscience. However, the comparison between species is not just important from a comparative point of view—the fact that some types of data can only be obtained in certain species means that a formal mapping between species can allow one to predict how unobtainable data would present any species of choice.

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Articles (15 in this collection)