Frontiers in Neuroscience series

1 st most-cited neuroscience journal series , publishing rigorously peer-reviewed research across a wide spectrum of specialties and disciplines

These are historical t mes for brain researchnamely for the Brain itself. The convergence of novel molecular and optical techn ques paves the way to the era of “causation neuroscience,” whereby many thousands of cells composing the system studied can be recorded from and man pulated n a very specific manner (e.g v a “optogenetics”) and the behavioral and functional consequences of these manipulations explored n vivo. It is also a new era of “anatomical neuroscience” - as recently developed techniques, both at the whole-bra n level (“connectome”) and the local circuit and synaptic level (“connectomics”) become more widely used These approaches allow us to link structure of specific brain regions and local circuits to function more astutely New research fields have recently emerged, e.g “neuroeconomics” and “neuroenergetics.” In add tion, and critically n our nformation-generating world, new nformat cs-based methods are being developed to store the enormous amount of new “big data” in a systematic manner, for data-preservat on data-mining and for extracting key information from these data. And, importantly, theoretical and computat onal approaches are being developed for ntegrat ng this diverse data and for der ving princ p es of brain operations that may otherwise lie h dden within the ntricacies of brain circuits

As the field is growing fast, we seek to integrate and cross-link stud es and citations in re ated subfields, providing an overv ew of the state-of-the-art in these fields and the ways in which they complement each other After all, we may each of us look at the brain from particular standpoints - al the way from “ genes to behavior” - yet the bra n integrates all these evels seamless y; this journal should reflect this n the best possib e way

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