Marmosets are stars of Japan’s ambitious brain project

Ten-year brain-mapping effort will use monkeys to study human neural and mental disorders.

David Cyranoski

08 October 2014

Marmosets share behaviours, such as making eye contact as a means of communication, with humans.

Europe has one, the United States has one. Now Japan has thrown its hat into the neuroscience ring with the launch of its own brain-mapping project.

Unlike its Western counter­parts, Japan’s effort will be based on a rare resource — a large population of marmosets that its scientists have developed over the past decade — and on new genetic techniques that might be used to modify these highly social animals. The goal of the ten-year Brain/MINDS (Brain Mapping by Integrated Neurotechnologies for Disease Studies) project is to map the primate brain to accelerate understanding of human disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and schizo­phrenia. On 11 September, the Japanese science ministry announced the names of the group leaders — and how the project would be organized.

Funded at ¥3 billion (US$27 million) for the first year, probably rising to about ¥4 billion for the second, Brain/MINDS is a fraction of the size of the European Union’s Human Brain Project and the United States’ BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neuro­technologies) Initiative, both of which are projected to receive at least US$1 billion over the next decade. But researchers involved in those efforts say that Brain/MINDS fills a crucial gap between disease models in smaller animals that too often fail to mimic human brain disorders, and models of the human brain that need validating data.

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