Paul Thompson, a neuroscientist who is the head of the Imaging Genetics Centre at the University of Southern California, is involved in the research. He says “What Enigma is doing is combing through every pixel of every scan and comparing it to every genome. This is a roadmap to how you do this.” The paper was published in Nature, and details that 30,717 brain scans with DNA information was used. Thompson claims that it is the biggest collaboration ever to combine efforts to study the brain, with the paper having 287 authors and 193 institutions listed.

MRI scans cost around £600 each, so it is expensive to gain the required amount of data. The research has mainly been funded by a $32 million grant awarded to Enigma and several other centres. This is part of the half a billion dollar investment in exploiting biological data being distributed over the next seven years by the Nation Institutes for Health. As well as new scans, they utilised $30 million worth of brain scans taken from people between the ages of nine to 96 years old previously for other studies.

The putamen, a part of the brain that influences movement and learning, was on average 2.8% smaller in people with variants of two genes. Thompson says that this is interesting, as this region is smaller in people suffering from Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease.

Despite all of the data, there was nothing showing links to psychiatric illnesses. Thompson says that there are clues pointing in this direction however. “It might not be as simple as the gene gives you a smaller putamen and you get these diseases, but the genes are likely to affect how many cells you have, and how they get to the right place,” he says. “It’s vital to know how it’s built.”

Thompson is convinced that with advances in the field and mathematics, there will be patterns identified within the data. Critics point out that the research completely down plays the role of environmental influences and life events, such as exercise and stress. However, Thompson hopes that the research will lead to substantial breakthroughs in brain science in time.

Andrew Goodman of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and his team studied 17 bacterial species that are normally found in the gut. The resilience in bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron was linked to the expression a protein called LpxF. This protein prevents the positively charged peptides from binding to the gut microbe’s surface by neutralising the negative charge of the cell membrane. In mouse guts during inflammation, mutants that did not express LpxF were out competed by other microbes in the gut.

Timothy Ryan at Pennsylvania State University in University Park and Colin Shaw at the University of Cambridge, UK, looked at the bone structure in the hip joint. The study looked at four human populations and primates from several hundred to several thousand years ago. They identified that thicker and denser bones existed in forager populations and thinner and lighter bones in agricultural groups, and similar to those of wild non-human primates.

Brian Richmond of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Habiba Chirchir of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC and their colleagues analysed modern and early humans, chimpanzees and several fossil ancestor species. They looked at upper and lower limb bones in these animals. They found that bone density, especially in lower limb joints, decreased in humans only relatively recently.

This suggests that physical activity is important for bone strength.

They were analysing the gene encoding the enzyme ADH4, which is made in the digestive tract to establish ethanol, and tracing its 70 million year evolutionary history. This was achieved by studying the gene in 28 mammals (including 17 primates), and synthesising ancestral forms of the enzyme. They found that ADH4 from ancestors of humans, gorillas and chimpanzees was much more efficient at breaking down ethanol than the enzyme found in more ancient gorillas.

It has been proposed that this change was due to the availability of fermented fruit on the forest floor than in trees, and helped the hominids adapt to life in their new environment.

The ability to design and create new genetic sequences, and insert them into animals, insects, viruses, bacteria and plants has been one of the greatest uses of genetics. This is the direct manipulation of an organism’s genome, to produce desired results. This has led to a huge influx in research around the subject, and has a many practical applications in the world.

It requires a gene to be selected and isolated that can then be inserted into the genetically modified organism. In plants this is mostly genes that provide protection against insects or tolerance to herbicides. Enzymes are used to cut DNA into fragments and gel electrophoresis to separate them out according to length. The desired part can then be extracted. If the gene is well studied, it could be artificially synthesised from information in a genetic library. The gene must be combined with other genetic elements in order to work properly, and can then be inserted into the DNA of the organism which is to become genetically modified to replace a removed gene.

Genetically modified crops have been produced which create plants which are more resistant to disease and pests, and are able to survive in harsher conditions. Animals have also been genetically modified so they grow faster, produce healthier food and resist disease. These have transformed the way in which food is produced and managed.

Gene therapy has also been an area which doctors have been looking at, by supplying patients suffering from a genetic defect healthy copies of a gene in an attempt to improve their quality of life. Genetics also allows genetic conditions such as cystic fibrosis to be identified in embryos in a lab by genetic screening, allowing in vitro fertilisation using embryos which do not have the genetic disorder. This allows parents with the condition to have a child in the knowledge that the disorder is not going to affect the child.

There are issues with genetic engineering however, as there have been concerns that this could lead to designer babies or dangerous DNA sequences being released into the gene pool. As this is still a field with many mysteries, care has to be taken that we unknowingly don’t do anything that will have dire environmental consequences in the future.

The brain of Henry Molaison (known to science until his death in 2008 as ‘Patient HM’), who was left with no short-term memory after surgery which cured him of epilepsy, has already improved our understanding of memory and will continue to do so for years to come.

He became one of the most famous people in neuroscience after he had several parts of his brain removed to cure him of his epilepsy in 1953. The amnesia which followed and his willingness to be tested helped give valuable insights into where memories are formed and stored in the brain.

When he died in 2008, his true identity was revealed to the world. He donated his brain to science after suffering respiratory failure. This lead to Jacopo Annese at the Brain Observatory in San Diego, California, being able to link memory problems to specific areas of Molaison’s damaged brain.

When Henry Molaison was a child, he had major epileptic seizures. He ended up seeking help from William Scoville at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut after anti-epileptic drugs failed to help with his condition. Scoville operated on Molaison (at the age of 27 years old) and removed portions of his brain. This included his medial temporal lobes, which contains an area called the hippocampus.

This lead to Molaison not being able to form any new memories (this is known as anterograde amnesia). Molaison also had some difficulty recalling past events (partial retrograde amnesia). The operation did however lead to Molaison’s epilepsy becoming manageable, despite the other effects on his brain. More information about ‘procedural memory’ was also gained. Molaison could learn new skills despite not remembering doing them before. This provided evidence that procedural memory was located outside of the hippocampi.

This helped scientists understand more about the brain and how it works. When the operation was performed, it was commonly believed that memory was stored throughout the brain. This was the initial indicator that memory was confined to certain areas, such as the hippocampi and areas around it (which were removed from Henry Molaison’s brain).

There were also some other issues apart from memory resulting from the surgery. Molaison lacked the ability to report internal states. This meant that he could not feel pain or tell whether he needed to eat or drink. This was because his entorhinal cortex was removed, which prevented the areas of the hippocampi that remained from functioning properly.

It was understood that only a dissection would tell us of his full injury, as scans taken between 1984 and 1993 were not of a high enough resolution in order to reveal everything. When he died in 2008, his brain was donated to science. It was frozen and cut into 2401 slices making up his brain, and these slices were only 70 micrometres thick. Pictures were taken of each slice in high resolution and took three days in total to complete. These images were used to create a very detailed 3D model which other researchers could view virtually (information about this can be found on thebrainobservatory.org). It was revealed that there was a lesion in the frontal lobes which had not been previously known. The individual slices were also preserved for any future use.

Molaison has been the most studied patient in the history of neuroscience, and the digital images and slices of his brain will provide new opportunities for neuroscience to benefit from him long after his death. The virtual 3D reconstruction and the post-mortem examination of his brain have been published and will now lead to further advances in our knowledge of the brain.