E11Bio announced PRISM, a new, scalable technology for mapping brain circuits

PRISM uses molecular ID codes and AI to help neurons trace themselves.

Researchers discovered a new cell barcoding approach exceeding comparable methods by more than 750x.

This is the heart of PRISM. Researchers integrated this capability with microscopy and AI image analysis to automatically trace neurons at high resolution and annotate them with molecular features.

This is a key advance towards economically viable brain mapping - 95% of costs stem from neuron tracing. It is also an important step towards democratizing neuron tracing for everyday neuroscience.

Solving these problems is critical for curing brain disorders, building safer and human-like AI, and even simulating brain function.

In first pilot study, researchers acquired a unique dataset in mouse hippocampus. Barcodes improved the accuracy of tracing genetically labelled neurons by 8x – with a clear path to 100x or more.

They also permit tracing across spatial gaps – essential for mitigating tissue section loss in whole-brain scaling.

Addgene constructs.
Volara.
Open data.