Public release date: 16-Sep-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Karl Leif Bates karl.bates@duke.edu 919-681-8054 Duke University

DURHAM, N.C. -- Explorers need good maps, which they often end up drawing themselves.

Pursuing their interests in using the brains of birds as a model for the human brain, an international team of researchers led by Duke neuroscientist Erich Jarvis and his collaborators Chun-Chun Chen and Kazuhiro Wada have just completed a mapping of the bird brain based on a 10-year exploration of the tiny cerebrums of eight species of birds.

In a special issue appearing online in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, two papers from the Jarvis group propose a dramatic redrawing of some boundaries and functional areas based on a computational analysis of the activity of 52 genes across 23 areas of the bird brain.

Jarvis, who is a professor of neurobiology at Duke, member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, said the most important takeaway from the new map is that the brains of all vertebrates, a group that includes birds as well as humans, have some important similarities that can be useful to research.

Most significantly, the new map argues for and supports the existence of columnar organization in the bird brain. "Columnar organization is a rule, rather than an exception found only in mammals," Jarvis said. "One way I visualize this view is that the avian brain is one big, giant gyrus folding around a ventricle space, functioning like what you'd find in the mammalian brain," he said.

To create different patterns of gene expression for the analysis, the birds were exposed to various environmental factors such as darkness or light, silence or bird song, hopping on a treadmill, and in the case of migratory warblers, a magnetic field that stimulated their navigational circuits.

The new map follows up on a 2004 model, proposed by an Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, also lead by Jarvis and colleagues, which officially changed a century-old view on the prevailing model that the avian brain contained mostly primitive regions. They argued instead that the avian brain has a cortical-like area and other forebrain regions similar to mammals, but organized differently.

"The change in terminology is small this time, but the change in concept is big," Jarvis said. For this special issue, the of Journal of Comparative Neurology commissioned a commentary by Juan Montiel and Zoltan Molnar, experts in brain evolution, to summarize the large amount of data presented in the studies by the Jarvis group.

Here is the original post:
10-year project redraws the map of bird brains

Comments are closed.