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. 2024 May 10;384(6696):eadk4858.
doi: 10.1126/science.adk4858. Epub 2024 May 10.

A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution

Alexander Shapson-Coe #  1   2 , Michał Januszewski #  3 , Daniel R Berger #  1 , Art Pope  4 , Yuelong Wu  1 , Tim Blakely  5 , Richard L Schalek  1 , Peter H Li  4 , Shuohong Wang  1 , Jeremy Maitin-Shepard  4 , Neha Karlupia  1 , Sven Dorkenwald  4   6   7 , Evelina Sjostedt  1 , Laramie Leavitt  4 , Dongil Lee  1   8 , Jakob Troidl  9 , Forrest Collman  10 , Luke Bailey  1 , Angerica Fitzmaurice  1   11 , Rohin Kar  1   11 , Benjamin Field  1   11 , Hank Wu  1   11 , Julian Wagner-Carena  1 , David Aley  1 , Joanna Lau  1 , Zudi Lin  9 , Donglai Wei  12 , Hanspeter Pfister  9 , Adi Peleg  1   13 , Viren Jain  4 , Jeff W Lichtman  1
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A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution

Alexander Shapson-Coe et al. Science. .

Abstract

To fully understand how the human brain works, knowledge of its structure at high resolution is needed. Presented here is a computationally intensive reconstruction of the ultrastructure of a cubic millimeter of human temporal cortex that was surgically removed to gain access to an underlying epileptic focus. It contains about 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and about 150 million synapses and comprises 1.4 petabytes. Our analysis showed that glia outnumber neurons 2:1, oligodendrocytes were the most common cell, deep layer excitatory neurons could be classified on the basis of dendritic orientation, and among thousands of weak connections to each neuron, there exist rare powerful axonal inputs of up to 50 synapses. Further studies using this resource may bring valuable insights into the mysteries of the human brain.

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