First High-Resolution Digital Mouse Brain Atlas Designed For Web Applications

Mouse and rat brain atlases have long been used to investigate human neurology. However, traditional brain atlases offer an incomplete map the brain and its function. "The Allen Reference Atlas: A Digital Color Brain Atlas of the C57BL/6J Male Mouse" offers the first brain atlas to augment traditional brain mapping methods with gene expression data to help delineate brain structures. The resulting atlas is a high-resolution vector-based digital mouse brain atlas designed specifically for web applications.

An essential companion to the Allen Brain Atlas online gene expression database - an open access resource generated by The Allen Institute for Brain Science - this atlas offers the unique opportunity to unite classical neuroanatomy with modern genomic science. It is thus a valuable resource for advancing the understanding of human brain disorders and diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, epilepsy, schizophrenia, autism, and addiction. "The Allen Reference Atlas" provides stunning, full-color plates showing finely annotated coronal and sagittal sections in the brain. Every brain structure in the atlas is assigned a distinct color based on its hierarchical position in the brain, offering a unique visual guide that emphasizes brain organization and greatly facilitates informatics processing. In addition, more than 80 genes showing unique expression patterns in the brain were carefully selected and are included as markers for substantially increasing the accuracy of brain structure delineations.

The print edition is offered with a free accompanying CD-ROM featuring black and white versions of artwork in low-resolution PDF files for ease of reference. A separately published DVD-ROM edition contains all of the content from the printed version and its accompanying CD-ROM, as well as higher-resolution color versions of each anatomical plate in the printed book and 264 supplementary coronal images. Both the print/CD-ROM edition and the DVD-ROM edition offer seamless coverage with the interactive online version and Allen Brain Atlas gene expression database, currently accessible at http://www.brain-map.org/.

"The Allen Reference Atlas" is an essential resource for basic and clinical neuroscientists, molecular biologists, genomics and informatics researchers, drug development researchers, physiologists, and computer scientists.