Brush your fingers against a surface and touch receptors in your skin relay tactile information to your brain. For mice, whiskers are an important way to collect this information. Neural pathways from their whiskers to their brains help them to scout their surroundings.
The somatosensory cortex contains maps of this sensory information. The researchers who created the above image used genetic markers to “label” cells to determine how this brain structure is organized. Normally, this brain area has distinct layers. But in mice with a genetic mutation that affects the migration of neurons during brain development, the layers were jumbled, resulting in a random color pattern.
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