Paul Allen’s next step — Mapping Genes in the Brain

The Allen Institute for Brain Science is launching a four-year, $55 million project to build an atlas of genes’ activity in the brain. From the WSJ:

“Jones and his colleagues will take about a half dozen brains from recently dead people who were neurologically and psychiatrically healthy. Then they’ll divide each brain into somewhere between 500 and 2000 regions, and look at what genes were turned on in each region. (Geeky bonus: They’ll do this by looking for mRNA, the genetic material that turns genes into proteins.) About 100,000 different proteins are expressed in the brain, Allen said.”