High performance computing on AWS and Amazon SageMaker are helping the Allen Institute manage all this data, scaling across multiple workloads. The platform also draws connections across brain research in different species, and Lein expects that the knowledge graph will eventually integrate information across all mammalian biology.Ĭloud computing is what’s enabling data from the brain’s approximately 200 billion cells to be stored, analyzed, and accessed as an open source tool that will ultimately be used by the clinicians seeking treatments and cures for brain diseases. “Once we start to connect pieces of information together, and we can connect data from the healthy brain to information from a diseased brain, that's where the magic is going to happen.” “This knowledge platform will enable researchers to make new discoveries that are not possible with current infrastructure,” said Mufti. These highly detailed cell atlases will help researchers understand the origins of disease and, eventually, allow clinicians to pinpoint why diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s occur. Thanks to new technologies that measure the genes being used within individual brain cells, researchers can now better understand the brain’s cellular complexity and the genes that give cells their distinct functions. The workhorse of the platform is single-cell genomics. Neuroscience needs a similar foundational resource, which the brain knowledge platform will help to create,” Lein said. Genomics has the human genome map, which has been transformative. The ultimate goal is to create a resource that will enable better diagnosis and treatment of the mental and neurological disorders and diseases that affect more than one-fifth of America’s population, costing the U.S.
It will be the first of its kind to compile and standardize massive datasets on the structure and function of mammal brains. The other part of the effort, led by the Allen Institute’s head of data and technology, Shoaib Mufti, in collaboration with AWS, will be to use this brain map to create the largest open source database of brain cell data in the world.
One part of the brain knowledge platform work, led by Lein and a network of neuroscience researchers from 17 institutes across the world, will be to make a new map of the entire brain at cellular resolution.
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