Research teams at the University of Utah and University of Colorado at Boulder have made technical advances that have significantly reduced the time it takes to map brain regions.

These include automation tools to tag every cell with a molecular signature, capture 25,000 TEM images weekly, and automatically merge thousands of images into gigabyte-scale mosaics and align the mosaics into terabyte-scale volumes.

The researchers plan to soon reveal the first molecular-level map of the entire retina and neuronal networks in both a normal mammalian retina and genetic models of retinal degeneration.

The technology also offers a new way to explore traumatic brain injury, neurodegenerative diseases, and epilepsy.