Of Toasters and Molecular Ticker Tapes 英文参考文献.docVIP

Review OfToastersandMolecularTickerTapes KonradP.Kording* NorthwesternUniversity,DepartmentsofPhysicalMedicineandRehabilitation,Physiology,andAppliedMathematics,Chicago,Illinois,UnitedStatesofAmerica grows,thenumberofpotentialconnectionsgrowsquadraticallyas eachneuronmayinteractwitheachotherneuron.This,inturn, Abstract: Experiments in systems neuroscience can be seenasconsistingofthreesteps:(1)selectingthesignals weareinterestedin,(2)probingthesystemwithcarefully chosenstimuli,and(3)gettingdataoutofthebrain.Here I discuss how emerging techniquesin molecular biology leads to models with many free parameters, which requires new statisticalmethodsoffittingtheseparameters. Molecular biology has seen accelerating progress over the last decades.Onereadilyquantifiablecostinmolecularbiologyisthat arestartingtoimprovethesethreesteps.Toestimateits of sequencing DNA. The development of a host of different future impact on experimental neuroscience, Iwill stress methods has allowed the cost of sequencing each base pair to the analogy of ongoing progress with that of micropro- dramatically decrease over time (Figure 1, solid). The rate of cessor production techniques. These techniques have allowed computers to simplify countless problems; because they are easier to use than mechanical timers, they are even built into toasters. Molecular biology may improvement is much faster than that of neuron recording techniques or even Moore’s law. This development allowed sequencing the entire human genome at a price of billions of advanceevenfasterthancomputerspeedsandhasmade immense progress in understanding and designing molecules. These advancements may in turn produce impressive improvements to each of the three steps, ultimatelyshiftingthebottleneckfromobtainingdatato interpretingit. dollars in the year 2003, and sequencing the same genome at higherqualitynowcostslessthan$2,000.Thecurrentpushisto sequence an entire genome for less than $1,000 [7]. This development allows solv