Researchers Create Public Online Database of Neuron Info
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon
University and the University of British
Columbia have created a publicly available online index of physiological
information about neurons in the brain.
There are billions of neurons in the brain, which can be organized into
approximately 300 types based on their physical and functional properties. The
NeuroElectro Project aims "to
accelerate the advance of neuroscience research by providing a centralized
resource for collecting and comparing data on neuronal function," according to
information from Carnegie Mellon.
In an effort to achieve this goal, the researchers have mined data from more
than 10,000 published papers about the electrophysiological properties of
different types of neurons. According to information from Carnegie Mellon, the
researchers used text mining algorithms and software to scan the papers and
identify the type of neuron studied and the electrophysiological data related to
the properties of that type of neuron. The process also gathered information
about how each of the experiments was completed and corrected the data to
account for differences arising from different experiment formats.
The researchers were able to mine data about approximately 100 types of
neurons. Since mining the data, the researchers have validated most of it, but
visitors to the site can flag data for further evaluation and also contribute
new data.
The researchers have published a paper in the
Journal of Neurophysiology describing the data available and some of the
analyses that can be performed with the online database.
The NeuroElectro Project can be found online at neuroelectro.org.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].