We're one step closer to understanding the complexity of the human brain.

Instead of characterizing cells on the basis of their shape or who they connect with or their firing properties.

Instead one can characterize them on the basis of the sets of genes that they use.

I'm Cyfry producer Shishana Bucksbaum.

It's Thursday, January 18th, and we've got our brain cells

firing on all cylinders because today is Science Friday. Late last year, scientists release

an impressively detailed map of human brain cells.

Considering the human brain has a little over 170 billion cells, it's a monumental task made possible by an international group of scientists.

They've identified 3,000 different types of cells.

Ira Flato and Scifry producer Kathleen Davis talk with one of the scientists who worked on the project and take listener calls.

Dr Ed Lean, senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science based in Seattle.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Good afternoon, thank you for having me.

Dr. Lean, just how big in advance is the Cell Atlas for the field of neuroscience? Are we talking about a human genome? of the that's a really good analogy for the advance made through this work as the first installment, really.

You know, one of the problems with neuroscientists, the extreme complexity of the brain.

And it's just very difficult to study for the human brain

the scale and the inaccessibility of studying the brain

are serious barriers.

And so we really needed a technology breakthrough to be able to handle this

complexity and the breakthrough very appropriate for the genome reference has

actually come from the field of genomics where instead of

characterizing cells on the basis of their shape or who they connect with or

...