Neural Stretch

Scientists map a mouse's peripheral nervous system in unprecedented detail

-  -Nora Bradford

YOUR PERIPHERAL NERVOUS SYSTEM (PNS) is crucial to navigating daily life. It lets you walk, controls your eye movements, and rings your brain's alarms when you step on a Lego brick. Yet researchers have never built a complete map of this essential network in any mammalian body.

Now a study published in Cell shows a complete, three dimensional map of every single nerve fiber threading through a mouse. It completes the first-ever mammalian "connectome," a flowchart of an entire nervous system, beyond just the well-researched brain and spinal cord.

"Mapping of the PNS has been a neglected component of mapping the connectome in animal and human brain studies," says John Darrell Van Horn, a brain and data science researcher at the University of Virginia, who was not involved in the study.