2023-10-13 12:44:43
Language neurons mapped in the brain. “The first high-resolution neuronal mapping of the portion of the human brain responsible for language, Broca’s area”, was carried out by an international team which in Italy involved the European Laboratory of Non-Linear Spectroscopies (Lens) based in Sesto Fiorentino (Florence). The Italian researchers associated with Lens are from the departments of Biology, Physics and Astronomy, and Experimental and Clinical Medicine of the University of Florence, as well as the National Institute of Optics of the National Research Council (Ino-Cnr). The results of the work are published in ‘Science Advances’.
The study group – led for Italy by Francesco Saverio Pavone, professor of Matter Physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Florentine University and associated with Lens and Cnr-Ino – created a complete ‘cellular atlas’ of the cortex brain of the human brain at the single cell level. Scientists used a combination of advanced imaging techniques and data analysis to jointly reconstruct the cellular architecture of a region of the brain’s frontal lobe, known as Broca’s area. In-depth understanding of brain cell types and their spatial distribution is essential to understanding how neural circuits generate complex perceptions and behaviors. The human brain is in fact an extremely complex organ – recalls a note – which embraces a surprising range of spatial scales, and to understand its properties and functionality it is essential to study its structure in detail, in its numerous classes of neurons, and visualize their distribution throughout the entire brain volume.
The authors developed a new way to document and quantify the cellular organization of neurons at the micrometer level, while maintaining the macroscopic spatial reference of the whole brain. This approach, currently applied to a single area of the brain, could be applied to various areas, even to entire hemispheres – the researchers predict – allowing in the future to obtain fundamental information on the structure, and therefore function, of the human brain.
The results of the research project, included within the American National Institutes of Health (NIH) program on brain mapping and also supported locally by the Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze with the ‘Human Brain Optical Mapping’ project, were obtained thanks to a joint effort in which, in addition to Lens, the Department of Radiology of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging of the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Department of Biomedical Engineering of Boston University, the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience participated and the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, and in the United Kingdom the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at University College London.
Having demonstrated that it is possible to create a cell atlas of an identifiable cortical region, the international research team has also obtained an important new funding of approximately 4.5 million dollars from the NIH, for a 3-year project within the American program ‘Brain connects’ (the Brain Initiative Connectivity Across Scales). The methods developed will be used to study the connectivity of the brain, in particular of the brainstem area, resolving at a microscopic level not only the types of cells present, but also the pathways and neural networks that characterize it and the connections that establish the functioning brain-body.
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