New frontiers in understanding brain development
Tue, Dec 09
|Webinar
How does the brain build itself? What sparks the transformation from a handful of cells into a complex organ that powers thought, emotion, and behavior? We will present the findings from a collection of scientific works aimed at mapping brain development in extraordinary detail.
Time & Location
Dec 09, 2025, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM PST
Webinar
About the event
DESCRIPTION
New cellular and spatial technologies are transforming our ability to map how the brain develops. From a handful of progenitor cells emerges a complex network of specialized cell types that Santiago Ramon y Cajal once described as a garden filled with ‘‘mysterious butterflies of the soul.’
In this webinar, we will feature key studies from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) consortium. The collected work maps the developmental trajectories of the mammalian brain across time, space, and species, at cellular resolution. These landmark studies combine single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, chromatin accessibility profiling, and lineage tracing to reconstruct how distinct cell types are generated, mature, and integrate into functional circuits throughout development. The result? Multimodal, cross-species atlases, unveiling the molecular, anatomical, and regulatory programs driving brain formation in human, non-human primate, and mouse.
This webinar will cover how these atlases provide developmental timelines and comparative frameworks, benchmarking cell types…