Scientists have created a map of the mouse brain, bringing them a step closer to understanding how gray matter works and what can be done for brain diseases.

Publishing their findings on Wednesday in the journal Nature, a team of researchers detailed the mouse "connectome," which shows the sinuous connections between neurons in the animal's brain, Reuters reported.

The researchers, who were led by Hongkui Zeng of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Wash., analyzed the neuronal connections by injecting a virus into specific parts of the brains of living mice, producing a glowing, green protein.

After the mice were killed, the fluorescent protein caused the neurons' circuits to show up under a microscope. The nearly complete resulting map includes the neuronal routes of all but 18 of the mouse brain's 295 distinct structures, Reuters reported.

The connectome revealed that connections that remain on one side of the brain seem to be stronger than ones that cross.

The mouse's neuronal connections "must be contributing to brain network computation," Zeng said. "We think a small number of strong connections and a large number of weak connections may be a fundamental network organization property to allow greater capacity of information processing."

Before the mouse project, the only nearly complete connectome mapped by scientists was one for the roundworm C. elegans, which has a brain with 302 neurons. The researchers hope the mouse connectome will eventually lead to mapping the human brain's 86 billion neurons, which can each make as many as 10,000 connections.

The project "provides the most detailed analysis of brain circuitry currently available for any mammalian brain," said neuroscientist David Van Essen of Washington University in St. Louis, co-leader of the human connectome project, as quoted by Reuters. "It is truly a landmark study."

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