By Vy Hoang

With recent advances in genetic and functional genomic methods, the field of neuroscience is playing catch up with the other areas of biology that have already adopted these techniques (Geschwind et al.). Some reasons behind its slow start are related to the complexity of the neural circuits, the dependency on post-mortem human tissue, and the massive amounts of data generated from neuroscience laboratories. However, these new technologies will also generate lots of data across multiple levels (phenotypic, genotypic, epigenetic, proteomic, and genomic). The question now is how do neuroscientists integrate these different layers of data? The answer is that they largely haven’t!

Using a reductionist view, neuroscientists have traditionally divided the brain into anatomical regions and have then tended to study each region in detail, but also in isolation (Villosalda et al.).  Although this approach has had its successes, the next step to understanding the complexity of the brain as a whole with regard to functions like memory, learning, and behavior is to integrate the knowledge of the different anatomical regions. Naturally such an ambitious goal is easier said than done.  Some sort of standardization in the protocols used for neuroscience experiments might be a step in the right direction, allowing researchers to combine experimental data more readily.

Neuroscientists might do well to consider the systems biology approach in which the components of a system are considered at multiple levels of detail whose properties are interrelated (Villosalda et al.). By enabling neuroscientists to integrate data in ways that allow them to study the brain as a whole, systems biology may help them to understand the mechanisms underlying neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia since their etiologies involve more than one section of the brain. The elucidation of these disease mechanisms would enable medical researchers to more clearly define neurological targets of interest and to develop safer and more effective therapies. Although the field of neuroscience may currently be lagging behind in embracing the systems biology approach, it seems likely that its researchers will also seek to take advantage of the benefits that it can offer before too much longer.