Shifting the paradigm: new approaches for characterizing and classifying neurons

Efforts to characterize and classify the cellular components of the nervous system have a rich history in modern neuroscience, and closely mirror the development of new techniques to assay cellular properties. Recent advances in high-throughput histology, genetics and neuroinformatics hold great promise for systematic and reproducible measurement and community databasing of cellular properties. In particular, transgenic approaches to reproducibly target and manipulate specific cell types in mice are rapidly advancing. Cre recombinase-based approaches in particular allow the coupling of cell type specificity with a wide variety of genetic tools for visualization, molecular profiling, tract tracing and functional manipulation. The reproducible multimodal characterization allowed by these transgenics provides a means to classify, building cellular taxonomies based on measurement of many phenotypic properties, as well as manipulate, moving beyond classification to understand the functional role of specific cell types and circuits in complex behaviors.