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Researchers of the Human Brain Project (HBP) have mapped four new areas of the human anterior prefrontal cortex that plays a major role in cognitive functions. Two of the newly identified areas are relatively larger in females than in males.

Behind these three words in the CV of brain researcher Nataliia Fedorchenko lie war and flight, and the hope that she will be able to use her knowledge, which she is now contributing to the Human Brain Project at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, to help rebuild Ukraine.

A team of researchers from the C. and O. Vogt Institute for Brain Research at the University of Düsseldorf and the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at Forschungszentrum Jülich have identified seven new areas of the human insular cortex, a region of the brain that is involved in a wide variety of functions, including self-awareness, cognition, motor control, sensory and emotional processing. All newly detected areas are now available as 3D probability maps in the Julich Brain Atlas, and can be openly accessed via the Human Brain Project’s EBRAINS infrastructure. Their findings, published in NeuroImage, provide new insights into the structural organisation of this complex and multifunctional region of the human neocortex.

Alexey Chervonnyy has been awarded a PhD Scholarship from the Hector Fellow Academy. The scholarship, awarded after a multi-stage selection process, will fund a three-year research project at the C. and O. Vogt Institute for Brain Research in Düsseldorf under the supervision of Hector Fellow Katrin Amunts. Chervonnyy will investigate the structure of the human hypothalamus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in regulating neuroendocrine, behavioural and autonomic processes essential to life, such as circadian rhythms, metabolic processes, sleep and body temperature.

New brain maps show that cells, receptors and gene activity change along the same boundaries. The study, which was conducted by researchers of the Institute of Neurosciences and Medicine (INM-1) at Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ), elucidates principles of human brain organisation for areas of the visual, auditory, somatosensory and motor systems.

Julich Brain Atlas researchers have identified six new areas that form a functional region with a crucial role in cognitive functions of the lateral prefrontal cortex of the human brain. The team from Forschungszentrum Jülich, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and RWTH Aachen University showed for the first time that the inferior frontal sulcus (IFS) and its junction (IFJ) are subdivided into six distinct areas, which are associated with working memory, language and music processing, among other functions.

Researchers of the Human Brain Project (HBP) found that in Parkinson’s disease the volumes of certain brain regions decrease over time in a specific pattern that is associated with clinical symptoms and largely coincides with the pattern described in Braak’s famous staging theory. The new study published in Cortex provides a detailed description of the structural changes over a long period of time and with an unprecedented spatial detail.