The allen brain atlas

Abstract

The Allen Brain Atlas is an online publicly available resource that integrates gene expression and connectivity data with neuroanatomical information for the mouse, human, and non-human primate. Launched in 2004 by the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the portal currently receives about 45 000 unique users each month. More than one petabyte of in situ hybridization imagery and over 240 million microarray data points from six adult human brains representing 3700 tissue samples have been generated to date. As one of the most comprehensive gene expression resources for the nervous system, scientists regularly use these resources to study the expression profile of genes in the various regions of the brain. Additional usage includes searching for biomarkers, correlating gene expression to neuroanatomy, and other large-scale correlative data analysis. This chapter reviews the resources available and describes how they were constructed to enable development of visualization and search tools to analyze the massive amount of data generated. Finally, examples are provided on how these tools can be leveraged for scientific discovery.