Forum for Science, Industry and Business

INCF and the Allen Institute for Brain Science Collaborate to Improve Allen Brain Atlas Service in Europe

The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) and the Allen Institute for Brain Science announced today that the INCF will contribute infrastructure and support services to enhance global access to the Institute’s Allen Brain Atlas—Mouse Brain. Publicly available for free to encourage widespread use and collaboration, the Allen Brain Atlas—Mouse Brain is a Web-based, genome-wide map of gene expression. It is actively used by scientists worldwide to advance research on the brain in health and disease.

Through the partnership agreement, the INCF is operating a mirror, or direct copy, of the atlas from its Secretariat in Stockholm, Sweden. The INCF will ensure the sustainability and technical maintenance of the mirror site, as well as optimal Internet connectivity, in order to guarantee the highest possible service performance and quality in Europe.

The Allen Institute is providing INCF with all content and data required for the mirror site. The Allen Brain Atlas—Mouse Brain contains expression patterns of approximately 20,000 genes mapped throughout the entire adult mouse brain, revealing where in the brain each gene is expressed, or “turned on” down to the cellular level.

“Helping brain researchers worldwide augment and accelerate their research programs is central to our mission,” said Elaine Jones, chief operating officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “Providing free and easy global access to our data is, thus, a top priority for the Allen Institute. We are thrilled to work with INCF to mirror the Allen Brain Atlas—Mouse Brain in Europe and thus enhance its performance for researchers overseas.”

“The Allen Brain Atlas—Mouse Brain is a unique neuroinformatics resource”, said Jan Bjaalie, executive director of the INCF. “The INCF sees a future of highly valuable services like this becoming more and more interoperable and interlinked, to the benefit of neuroscience researchers. By entering this collaboration with the Allen Institute for Brain Science the INCF aims to play a key role in making this happen.”

This collaboration brings together an international outreach organization, the INCF, and a U.S.-based non-profit medical research organization, the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Together, these organizations share the mission to provide new and improved resources and infrastructure intended to accelerate scientific progress towards a better understanding of the brain.

The launch of the brain atlas mirror inaugurates a three-year partnership with a main objective to extend and enhance the quality of services provided by the Allen Brain Atlas—Mouse Brain for neuroscientists within Europe. In addition, the atlas database is undeniably a valuable resource that presents opportunities for further development of tools, models and resource integration services, a key element of the INCF mission.

Technical operation and server hosting is located at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden, an organization with strong technology expertise and advanced computer operation facilities.

Elli Chatzopoulou | alfa
Further information:
http://www.incf.org

Im Focus: Carbon Nanotubes Turn Electrical Current into Light-emitting Quasi-particles

Strong light-matter coupling in these semiconducting tubes may hold the key to electrically pumped lasers

Light-matter quasi-particles can be generated electrically in semiconducting carbon nanotubes. Material scientists and physicists from Heidelberg University...

Im Focus: Flexible proximity sensor creates smart surfaces

Fraunhofer IPA has developed a proximity sensor made from silicone and carbon nanotubes (CNT) which detects objects and determines their position. The materials and printing process used mean that the sensor is extremely flexible, economical and can be used for large surfaces. Industry and research partners can use and further develop this innovation straight away.

At first glance, the proximity sensor appears to be nothing special: a thin, elastic layer of silicone onto which black square surfaces are printed, but these...

Im Focus: 3-D scanning with water

3-D shape acquisition using water displacement as the shape sensor for the reconstruction of complex objects

A global team of computer scientists and engineers have developed an innovative technique that more completely reconstructs challenging 3D objects. An ancient...

Im Focus: Manipulating Electron Spins Without Loss of Information

Physicists have developed a new technique that uses electrical voltages to control the electron spin on a chip. The newly-developed method provides protection from spin decay, meaning that the contained information can be maintained and transmitted over comparatively large distances, as has been demonstrated by a team from the University of Basel’s Department of Physics and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute. The results have been published in Physical Review X.

For several years, researchers have been trying to use the spin of an electron to store and transmit information. The spin of each electron is always coupled...

Im Focus: The proton precisely weighted

What is the mass of a proton? Scientists from Germany and Japan successfully did an important step towards the most exact knowledge of this fundamental constant. By means of precision measurements on a single proton, they could improve the precision by a factor of three and also correct the existing value.

To determine the mass of a single proton still more accurate – a group of physicists led by Klaus Blaum and Sven Sturm of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear...