Scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) will join members of an international team on an ambitious scientific project to map the brain in the most detailed way possible with the current technology available.
The Synchrotron for Neuroscience – Asia Pacific Strategic enterprise (SYNAPSE) was launched on Jan. 15, 2020.
It combines the efforts of teams from Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to produce the first-ever ultra-high-resolution 3D comprehensive map of the human brain’s neural network.
A Memorandum of Understanding was signed on the same day by the founding members of the initiative, committing to work together to complete the extensive brain mapping project.
The project is expected to involve more than 1,000 researchers.
Current techniques can only capture specific areas of the human brain.
This project will make use of synchrotrons, which are extremely powerful x-rays to help to trace the complex and intricate networks that cover the brain.
Faster than conventional methods
The x-ray imaging will be complemented with other advanced brain imaging techniques to provide ultra-small structural details of the entire brain.
This is 10 times faster than current methods of brain scanning, such as super-resolution microscopy or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).
The SYNAPSE collaboration is likely to take four years to map a human brain, where other methods out there would take as long as the lifespan of an average person.
Given how memory and labour-intensive the project is, each team will analyse one part of a yet-to-donated human brain.
The data will then be collated in Singapore through the high-speed international network connections of the Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SingAREN).
In Singapore, the team will leverage the petascale supercomputing resources at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) to handle the sheer amount of information from the project.
Project could provide clues about psychiatric diseases
This project will help enhance the understanding of the structure of the brain and its composition, and allow for clarification of its normal functions and identify causes of brain diseases.
This could very well be the breakthrough needed to tackle brain diseases and psychiatric conditions.
Professor Arthur Konnerth from the Technical University of Munich, Germany who also sits on the independent International Advisory Board (IAB) to SYNAPSE, explains SYNAPSE is important as we don’t understand the basis of virtually every psychiatric disease there is.
“For now, most of our treatments don’t really work precisely. We give drugs that act in many places of the brain and that’s why we have so many side effects,” he said.
Konnerth adds that if we were able to procure a specific brain map, one which can tell us the functions of the few cells that are being destroyed, they may be able to carry out treatments in the brain in a more targeted manner.
Findings may contribute to effective treatment
Konnerth illustrates our lack of understanding of psychiatric diseases with the example of Alzheimer’s disease.
While it has been determined that the disease starts out as a “molecular impairment” from birth, it only manifests into the disease much later in life.
“From the time of the first changes on a cellular level, until the disease emerges, we still don’t understand why people would have the ‘fingerprint’ of Alzheimer’s Disease,” he added.
“One of the hopes could be to actually catch the disease at an early stage when the disease is just about to start.”
Associate Professor Low Chian Ming from the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine’s Department of Pharmacology and Department of Anaesthesia is a co-founding member of this international group and the team lead for Singapore says that the growing impact of brain diseases has caused brain mapping to gain impetus globally.
“What we are setting out to do is a world-first enterprise. The images captured with unprecedented speed, clarity and granularity by SYNAPSE will form an extensive human brain map. They will show how neurons are connected and how they interact to result in cognition and intelligence.”
“Our findings could potentially contribute to effective treatment for increasingly important neurodegenerative pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia,” Low explained.
The project is expected be completed by 2024.
Top image courtesy of NUS Medicine
