Courtesy of MCT Campus

Nine institutions, including the Washington University School of Medicine, have been granted $30 million for research on the Human Connectome Project. This project will explore inherited aspects within the brain, abnormalities and other factors to further explain psychiatric disorders and unravel the mysteries of the human brain.

A consortium of nine institutions, led by Washington University School of Medicine and University of Minnesota Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, has received a $30 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for the Human Connectome Project.

The Project is a five-year study that officially began last month and is aimed at learning about the wiring of the healthy human brain. Because particular regions of the brain do not have one-to-one correspondences with certain functions, the brain is composed of numerous circuits, all of which work together to carry out these functions. Researchers plan to scan the brains of 1,200 healthy adults and map out which areas and connections of the brain correspond to specific functions.

This program goes to unprecedented depths, as it will include a far greater database of cases and more accurate scans than those of previous projects.

A new generation of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines is needed for the project and will be designed by the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research under the supervision of professor of radiology Kamil Ugurbil. Ugurbil is the director of the center and the principal investigator for the Human Connectome Project. The MRI machines will be shipped between Minnesota and the University.

The experiment will scan the brains of identical twins and non-twin siblings in order to learn about the aspects of brain circuitry that are inherited. Each subject will be asked to carry out specific tasks while in the MRI scanner, and the activation of certain brain regions will provide the researchers with insight into which regions of the brain are active during these tasks. Blood samples will also be taken from the subjects in order to learn about what aspects of brain circuitry are influenced by specific genes in the human genome. More insight into genetic sequencing should be available by the Human Connectome Project’s fifth year.

Researchers hope that the information collected from the study will produce more questions that the Human Connectome Project or subsequent studies can begin to answer. Project data will become available to the public in hopes that the community of neuroscientists can begin to explore the fascinating questions of brain circuitry, brain structure and brain function. Explorations of the differences in brain circuitry in individuals with schizophrenia, autism and other brain-related disorders seem to be an inevitable undertaking of the project in later years.

Learning more information about abnormalities and psychiatric disorders, however, is not the only long-term goal for this project. Obtained data should also expand our knowledge of certain regions of the brain as a whole, such as the cerebral cortex, subcortical structures and cerebellum.

“We hope to find not just the typical wiring diagram of the brain but what the individual differences are and how those can give insights into what makes each of us a unique human being with distinct capabilities,” said David Van Essen, a principal investigator of the Human Connectome Project, Edison Professor of Neurobiology and head of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the Washington University School of Medicine.

Although the accuracy of MRI has been unprecedented, there are limitations of the methods used. The methods of the Human Connectome Project can capture information about the connectivity at a scale of 1-2 millimeters in physical dimension, yet within each of those patches are hundreds of thousands of individual neurons. Each individual neuron has a distinct connectivity or pathway and the researchers will not have access to that level of information.

In five years, Van Essen hopes that one petabyte (over one million gigabytes) of data will be obtained. A complete map of the brain should be available, and although many questions may be answered in some ways, even more questions will become available for exploration. The ambitious endeavor will create a significant impact the field of neuroscience.

“We are up and going full steam ahead,” Van Essen said.