Allen Institute teams up with AWS to construct first-ever map of the brain

Just because the periodic table is foundational to chemistry and the Human Genome Project revolutionized modern genetics, researchers on the Allen Institute for Brain Science have teamed up with Amazon Web Services to create what could grow to be a “transformative” latest resource for the sphere of neuroscience. 

AWS on Wednesday announced its technology will support the Allen Institute because it builds a map of the human brain, called the Brain Knowledge Platform. This platform, the primary of its kind, is designed to be a whole reference of individual cells within the brain, and will eventually serve because the world’s largest open-source brain cell database. 

To construct the brand new platform, the Allen Institute is using single cell genomics technologies. Researchers measure the genes utilized by individual brain cells to create a “cell fingerprint,” and cells with similar fingerprints will probably be grouped into “cell types,” leading to a high-resolution map of all the brain. 

Once the reference is complete, scientists should higher understand links between genetics and different cognitive functions. Researchers imagine the platform could provide insights into why diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s occur. 

“This really is just like the periodic table for the brain,” Dr. Ed Lein, senior investigator on the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said Wednesday during a presentation concerning the platform in Washington, D.C. “It’s revealed in dramatically higher complexity than we have ever had access to before.”

The Allen Institute is a nonprofit research institute based in Seattle. It’s made up of several different institutes, including one which focuses on neuroscience, and is maybe best known for creating a lot of different large-scale data resources.  

But despite the fact that the Allen Institute isn’t any stranger to data, there are lots of of billions of cells within the brain — so making a reference just like the Brain Knowledge Platform means researchers can have to contend with massive amounts of information. 

“We’re just running into these enormous, enormous problems of information size,” Lein said during a briefing with reporters Wednesday. “The dimensions of information just keeps getting larger and greater.”

As such, the Allen Institute is leveraging AWS’ cloud computing and machine learning to standardize and consolidate complex brain data into one place. 

When carrying out research involving genetics and imaging, scientists are sometimes working with petabytes and even exabytes of information. Dr. Rowland Illing, director of international public sector health at AWS, said on the briefing that consuming 40 petabytes of information would require someone to observe 4K video for twenty-four hours a day, seven days per week, for 100 years. 

The quantity of information available to researchers is anticipated to continue to grow in coming years, but Lein said there may be also a number of existing brain data within the neuroscience field. The issue, he said, is that much of it’s disorganized and decentralized, which makes it difficult for researchers to access. 

The Allen Institute plans to make use of AWS’ technology to successfully interpret this disparate data even when it’s stored across different formats and locations, which Lein said will hopefully further democratize access to knowledge and produce parts of the neuroscience community together. 

“While this is de facto in its early phases now, the goal of the Brain Knowledge Platform is to remodel this fragmented landscape of neuroscience information right into a unified ecosystem,” he said.

The Allen Institute will work to construct the Brain Knowledge Platform over the subsequent five years. Lein said it remains to be in its early phases, however the potential for the tech is immense. 

“If we will do that, imagine the impact on the sphere,” he said. “We will unify the disparate parts of the sphere that may’t consult with each other in the meanwhile. We will speed up our understanding of brain function, in addition to latest approaches for treating diseases.”