Allen Institute - Latest News and Information
Dr. Caitlyn Cassimo outlines three enduring mysteries of the brain: cell taxonomy, disease mechanisms, and visual processing. Researchers have cataloged over 5,000 mouse neuron types and are extending this effort to humans, yet a universal classification scheme remains elusive. Mapping projects at the Allen Institute compare healthy and diseased brains to pinpoint which cell populations deteriorate in conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. A breakthrough comes from neuropixels probes, which capture activity from tens of thousands of neurons at once—akin to viewing a full‑resolution movie rather than scattered pixels. This high‑density data is already revealing how the visual cortex integrates information and could guide interventions for vision loss. These advances promise more precise, cell‑targeted therapies and a deeper grasp of brain function, accelerating translational research across neurology and ophthalmology.
The Allen Institute’s Science Matters fireside chat featured neuroscientist Ben Rein discussing his new book “Why Brains Need Friends.” Rein framed social connection as a biological drive comparable to food and water, noting the Surgeon General’s 2023 declaration of loneliness...
The webinar presented a new Allen Institute effort to build a cross‑species spinal cord taxonomy, leveraging multi‑omics data from human donors, macaques and mice. By generating 10x multi‑ome profiles, spatial transcriptomics and epigenetic maps, the team assembled a comprehensive cellular...
Researchers at UCSF and the Allen Institute unveiled CellTransformer, an AI model that automatically classifies roughly 1,300 distinct regions of the mouse brain, leveraging the scale of modern neuroscience datasets. The system ingests multimodal data—single‑cell RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and epigenomic...
Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute, opened his SXSW 2026 talk by defining consciousness as the everyday, subjective experience of seeing, feeling, dreaming and more, and highlighted its status as a private, unobservable phenomenon that must be inferred....
Doctor Kaitlyn Casimo, a neuroscientist, frames the video around three enduring mysteries of the brain: cell taxonomy, disease mechanisms, and visual processing. She emphasizes that while we know the brain contains neurons, glia, fat, water, and blood vessels, the overarching...
