Macaques serve as an ideal model for studying the mechanisms of human cognitive function and simulating human brain diseases, as they are highly similar to humans in genetics, physiology, and brain structure.

　　Recently, the team at the Brainnetome Center of the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, continued the approach of "mapping based on brain connectivity information" and produced a new macaque brainnetome atlas. This achievement was recently published in Science Bulletin.

△Overall research approach

　　The new macaque brainnetome atlas not only reasonably and finely parcellates brain regions, but also describes in detail the macroscopic connectivity between subregions of each brain area. As a reliable reference system, it can effectively integrate multi-scale brain images and multi-omics information, thereby producing a multimodal, cross-scale macaque brain atlas.

　　As a panoramic brain atlas depicting the spatial organizational architecture of the macaque brain, the macaque brainnetome atlas will overcome many shortcomings of existing atlases, including limitations such as covering only specific anatomical regions and containing only single-modality information. At the same time, the human and macaque brainnetome atlases produced based on the same theories and methods will play a key role in effectively transferring information and knowledge obtained from the monkey brain to the human brain.

△Macaque brainnetome atlas

　　The research team is currently continuing to collect data to further improve the macaque brainnetome atlas and to add additional neural tracer and tissue section staining images. In addition, the concepts and methods for constructing brainnetome atlases have the potential to be extended to other species for comparative research, and will play an important role in cross-species comparison, translational medicine, and computational modeling.

△Multimodal information using the macaque brainnetome atlas as reference space

　　The macaque brainnetome atlas not only provides a new multimodal spatial map for understanding the working mechanisms of brain function at multiple levels, but will also advance important research fields such as translational medicine, cross-species comparison, and digital modeling of the brain.