Editorial

Welcome to Neural Systems and Circuits: bridging the gap between theory and experiment

Peter E Latham^1* and Venkatesh N Murthy²

• * Corresponding author: Peter E Latham pel@gatsby.ucl.ac.uk

Author Affiliations

¹ Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL, London, UK

² Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

For all author emails, please log on.

Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:1 doi:10.1186/2042-1001-1-1

Published: 26 January 2011

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

Neuroscientists study the brain at many levels of organization - from single molecules to the entire brain. Over the past 30 odd years, advances in molecular biology, genetics and biophysical methods have revolutionized studies at the small scale - ion channels, synapses and subcellular compartments. At the other end, advances in macroscopic brain mapping have ignited a wave of studies at the large scale. However, the computations carried out by brains are best understood in terms of the collective behavior of neuronal populations. Although we have known the value of circuit-level analysis for some time now, limitations in experimental and analytical tools have been significant barriers for progress. Brains are made up of staggering numbers of neurons (~10⁵ in fruit flies, ~10¹¹ neurons in humans); we don't know the detailed connectivity, we don't have a detailed understanding of the input and output, and we don't know the algorithms. We are often probing in the dark.