Posted in 2025
Uncharted brains: expanding beyond existing atlases
- 17 March 2025
We’ve just released a new digital 3D atlas for the Eurasian blackcap. This marks a key shift for us: beyond providing a common interface for existing neuroanatomical atlases, we are now also building new ones.
An Atlas for the dwarf cuttlefish, Sepia bandensis has been added to BrainGlobe
- 10 March 2025
Cephalopods are fascinating model organisms for neuroscience research. The dwarf cuttlefish in particular (Sepia bandensis) is known for its camouflage using dynamic skin pattern changes, but it is also known to display social communication behaviour. In 2023, Montague et al. created a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) atlas by combining data from 8 dwarf cuttlefish brains (4 female, 4 male) using deep learning. The cuttlefish atlas provides researchers with a useful resource for investigating the neural processes governing cephalopod behaviour.
An Atlas for the domestic cat has been added to BrainGlobe
- 28 February 2025
Stolzberg et al. (2017) created an MRI atlas of the cat brain cortex at 500um resolution, nicknamed the “Catlas”. Former UCL MSc student Henry Crosswell and the BrainGlobe team have now made this atlas available through BrainGlobe. We called it csl_cat_500um, after the Cerebral Systems Lab (CSL) that created this original data. Its main use is to standardise functional studies in cats - note that its annotations only cover the cortex.
An overview of recently added mouse atlases
- 20 February 2025
Eagle-eyed BrainGlobe enthusiasts will have spotted several new atlases appearing in the BrainGlobe Atlas API in recent weeks. In 2025, we’ve made three new mouse brain atlases newly available through BrainGlobe: The Kim developmental mouse brain atlas (version 1), the Gubra multimodal mouse brain atlas and the Australian mouse brain atlas. Mice are widely used in neuroscience, so it’s no surprise there are many mouse brain atlases. In this blogpost, we describe the newly added atlases in more detail, and suggest potential use cases. This blog covers the new murine atlases only - we have also added the first non-human primate brain atlas to BrainGlobe (and brain atlases for a cat and a cuttlefish are underway)!
An Atlas for the non-human primate Microcebus murinus (grey mouse lemur) has been added to BrainGlobe
- 28 January 2025
Thanks to its small size and its close phylogenetic relation to humans (compared to other model organisms), the grey mouse lemur is a practical choice to study brain evolution and disease. Nadkarni et al. made the first publicly available mouse lemur atlas in 2018. They imaged mouse lemur brains with MRI at 91μm resolution. Thanks to Harry Carey (University of Oslo) it is now accessible from BrainGlobe. In reference to its original authors, the atlas is named nadkarni_mri_mouselemur_91um in the BrainGlobe ecosystem.