The project was born from Zador’s frustration during his “day job” as a neurophysiologist, as he wryly referred to it. He studies auditory decision-making in rodents: how their brain hears sounds, processes the audio information and determines a behavioral output or action. Electrophysiological recordings and the other traditional tools for addressing such questions left the mathematically inclined scientist unsatisfied. The problem, according to Zador, is that we don’t understand enough about the circuitry of the neurons, which is the reason he pursues his “second job” creating tools for imaging the brain.

The current state of the art for brain mapping is embodied by the Allen Brain Atlas, which was compiled from work in many laboratories over several years at a cost upward of $25 million. The Allen Atlas is what’s known as a bulk connectivity atlas because it traces known subpopulations of neurons and their projections as groups. It has been highly useful for researchers, but it cannot distinguish subtle differences within the groups or neuron subpopulations.

If we ever want to know how a mouse hears a high-pitched trill, processes that the sound means a refreshing drink reward is available and lays down new memories to recall the treat later, we will need to start with a map or wiring diagram for the brain. In Zador’s view, lack of knowledge about that kind of neural circuitry is partly to blame for why more progress has not been made in the treatment of psychiatric disorders, and why artificial intelligence is still not all that intelligent.

Justus Kebschull, a Stanford University neuroscientist, an author of the new Nature paper and a former graduate student in Zador’s lab, remarked that doing neuroscience without knowing about the circuitry is like “trying to understand how a computer works by looking at it from the outside, sticking an electrode in and probing what we can find. … Without ever knowing the hard drive is connected to the processor and the USB pod provides input to the whole system, it’s difficult to understand what’s happening.”

Inspiration for MAPseq struck Zador when he learned of another brain mapping technique called Brainbow. Hailing from the lab of Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University, this method was remarkable in that it genetically labeled up to 200 individual neurons simultaneously using different combinations of fluorescent dyes. The results were a tantalizing, multicolored tableau of neon-colored neurons that displayed, in detail, the complex intermingling of axons and neuron cell bodies. The groundbreaking work gave hope that mapping the connectome — the complete plan of neural connections in the brain — was soon to be a reality. Unfortunately, a limitation of the technique in practice is that through a microscope, experimenters could resolve only about five to 10 distinct colors, which was not enough to penetrate the tangle of neurons in the cortex and map many neurons at once.

That’s when the lightbulb went on in Zador’s head. He realized that the challenge of the connectome’s huge complexity might be tamed if researchers could harness the increasing speed and dwindling costs of high-throughput genomic sequencing techniques. “It’s what mathematicians call reducing it to a previously solved problem,” he explained.