Colaborative Research: Accessing Brain Collection Informationand Images Via Internet, CD-Rom and Centralized Location

为了了解大脑的功能，我们需要了解大脑的结构。哺乳动物的进化导致了大脑解剖学上的许多差异，但我们对这些差异与动物行为的广泛多样性之间的关系知之甚少。这个合作项目是为了巩固和使研究和教育更容易获得两个主要的收藏，形成一个独特的，广泛的，保存完好的比较哺乳动物脑标本的集合。总共有275多个切片和染色的大脑，包括50多万张显微镜载玻片，代表了哺乳动物17个不同目50个科的150多个物种。许多来自稀有或濒危物种的标本是不可替代的，因此可以为生物多样性问题提供至关重要的独特数据。这些藏品将被带到华盛顿特区的一个国家博物馆，加入到补充广泛的人类大脑收藏中，从而建立一个单一的地点来存储、管理和研究比较哺乳动物的脑神经解剖学。一个电子网站也正在开发中，其中包括若干选定的图像，研究人员可以在世界各地访问这些图像以获取数据，或用来评估是否对该网站本身进行研究访问以检查原始材料。这个项目的影响很大。首先，它安全地为未来的研究保存了一种不可替代的资源，这也代表了数十人50多年来的严格工作的科学投资。其次，它促进了比较神经科学、行为学和系统学的多学科研究，以了解已知最复杂器官的多样性，为数字成像和多维数据库的技术发展增加了计算专业知识。第三，它提供了一个工作基础和模型，用于与其他集合（如非哺乳动物脊椎动物的大脑）共享复杂的形态学数据。第四，该项目将通过提供简单的网站访问有关生物多样性背景下脊椎动物大脑的信息，从而对教育和研究产生影响。

To understand brain function, we need to understand brain structure. The evolution of mammals has led to many differences in brain anatomy, but we know very little how those differences correlate to the wide diversity of animal behavior. This collaborative project is to consolidate and make more accessible for research and education two major collections that form a unique, extensive, remarkably preserved assembly of comparative mammalian brain specimens. Together they contain more than 275 sectioned and stained brains, including over a half million microscope slides, representing over 150 species, from 50 Families in 17 different Orders of Mammalia. Many specimens are irreplaceable, from rare or endangered species, and so can provide critically unique data for questions about biodiversity. The collections are being brought to a national museum facility in Washington DC to join complementary extensive human brain collections, and so establish a single site for storage, curation, and research on comparative mammalian brain neuroanatomy. An electronic/website also is being developed, including several selected images, which researchers could access worldwide for data, or use to evaluate whether to make a research visit to the site itself to examine the original material. The impact of this project is high. First, it safely preserves for future research an irreplaceable resource that also represents a scientific investment of more than 50 years of exacting work by dozens of people. Second, it promotes multidisciplinary research on comparative neuroscience, behavior, and systematics to understand the diversity in the most complex organ known, adding computational expertise for technological development of digital imaging and multidimensional databases. Third, it provides a working base as well as a model for sharing complex morphological data with other collections, such as those on non-mammalian vertebrate brains. Fourth, the project will have educati onal as well as research impact by providing easy website access to information about the vertebrate brain in the context of biodiversity.