A very cool article on a new open source, online system to crowd source the assemblage of data in neuroscience from the Voice of San Diego.  From the article:

Traditionally, the study of the brain was organized somewhat like an archipelago. Neuroscientists would inhabit their own island or peninsula of the brain, and see little reason to venture elsewhere.

Molecular neuroscientists, who study how DNA and RNA function in the brain, didn’t share their work with cognitive specialists who study how psychological and cognitive functions are produced by the brain, for example.

But there has been an awakening to the idea that brains of humans and mammals should be studied like the complex, and interrelated systems that they are. Neuroscientists realized that they had to start collaborating across disciplines and sharing their data if they wanted to make advances in their own field.

[...]

Ellisman and his UCSD colleagues have devised a solution: crowdsource a brain. And this week they unveiled their years-long project — the Whole Brain Catalog — at the annual convention of the Society for Neuroscience, the largest gathering of brain experts in the world.

You can also see an impressive  artists rendition of the Whole Brain Catalog on YouTube.

UPDATE 10/27: Looks like Voice of San Diego scooped the New York Times, who just posted on this topic in today’s bits blog.

Full disclosure: I am intimately involved with this project.

I’m a fan of it because it is an open-access journal featuring a “tiered system” and more.  From their website:

The Frontiers Journal Series is not just another journal. It is a new approach to scientific publishing. As service to scientists, it is driven by researchers for researchers but it also serves the interests of the general public. Frontiers disseminates research in a tiered system that begins with original articles submitted to Specialty Journals. It evaluates research truly democratically and objectively based on the reading activity of the scientific communities and the public. And it drives the most outstanding and relevant research up to the next tier journals, the Field Journals.

I’m a big fan of the variety of specialty journals they have:

• Aging Neuroscience
• Behavioral Neuroscience
• Cellular Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience
• Enteric Neuroscience
• Evolutionary Neuroscience
• Human Neuroscience
• Integrative Neuroscience
• Molecular Neuroscience
• Neural Circuits
• Neuroanatomy
• Neuroenergetics
• Neuroengineering
• Neurogenesis
• Neurogenomics
• Neuroinformatics
• Neuromethods
• Neuropharamacology
• Neuroprosthetics
• Neurorobotics
• Synaptic Neuroscience
• Systems Neuroscience

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/october8/hamster-100808.html:

The hamsters were first exposed to two hours of bright light late at night. Then the next day the researchers delayed the usual light/dark cycle by three hours.

This disrupted their circadian rhythm, and made it hard for them to learn.

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/40/15593:

Control hamsters exhibited normal circadian modulation of performance in a delayed novel-object recognition task. By contrast, arrhythmic animals could not discriminate a novel object from a familiar one only 20 or 60 min after training.

Memory performance was not related to prior sleep history as sleep manipulations had no effect on performance.

Because GABA is the primary neurotransmitter of the SCN, we hypothesized that the normal pattern of GABA output from the SCN may have been altered in arrhythmic hamsters in such a way as to increase inhibitory input at SCN target sites involved in cognition.

“What I thought was happening was that our animals were having chronically high levels of GABA because they had lost their circadian rhythm,” Ruby said. “So instead of rhythmic GABA, it is just constant GABA output.”
(from the press release (the first link))

So to test this, they blocked GABA, and indeed,

The GABA antagonist pentylenetetrazol restored learning without restoring circadian rhythms…

One interesting thing this is that it adds another item to the list of functions of the circadian rhythm, a list that is so far is surprisingly short:

…the good health and longevity of suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN)-lesioned animals support the notion that the circadian system is of little consequence to their overall physiology. One notable exception to this trend is reproduction in rodents. Elimination of circadian timing by SCN ablation eliminates estrous cycles and thereby prevents reproduction… (from the journal article)

Here’s a neat new website. It’s a repository of quantitative information on biological things (eg. organisms, biomolecules, etc.) Some stuff I found while glancing through:

Number of mRNA/cell in E. coli: 138

Volume occupied by all RNA in E. coli: 6%

Average gene length in mammals: 16.6kb

Average gene length in nematode C. elegans:  4 kb

Mutation rate per genome per replication in humans: 0.16 mutation/genome/replication

Average time between blinks in humans: 2.8 sec

Amount of photons necessary to excite a cone in humans: 100

Citations are included for most numbers too. The database seems a little sparse on neuroscience topics, so go over and contribute some numbers!