Your brain is made up of billions of neurons connected by trillions of synapses.
And how theyre arranged gives rise to the brains functionality and to your personality.
While this is a colossal achievement, the great challenge now lies in learning to decipher the atlas.
And its a huge one.
Science is full of this kind of problem: how to turn large amounts of information into useful insight.
For many years, researchers relied on mathematics and statistics to explore data.
Using the mouses brain as an example, its physical shape determines its functionality.
Behind the physical shape lies a more abstract shape formed by the interconnections within the brain.
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This number doesnt change no matter how the shape is bent or deformed.
Andtopologyis the study of these kind of constant properties of shapes.
Topology went through rapid development during the 20th century as a prominent subject in pure mathematics.
Because topology focuses on constant properties, its techniques make it insensitive to various data inaccuracies or noise.
This makes it ideal for deciphering the true meaning behind the collected data.
VIKTORIIA NOVOKHATSKA/Shutterstock
You are probably familiar with a common topological phenomenon.
A wire is a very simple shape.
Each chain is a very long wire, built up from a sequence of small molecules called nucleobases.
When a cell divides, these wires unwind, replicate and then coil up again.
Special enzymes in the cell calledtopoisomeraseshave the task of preventing such a catastrophe.
And deliberately disrupting the topoisomerases of bacteria prevents them from spreading and so stops an infection.
And since entanglement is a purely topological feature,topological techniquescanhelp us do that.
Drug development
Topology can also be used to improve the creation of new drugs.
Pharmaceutical drugs are chemicals designed to interact with certain cells in the body in a particular way.
So producing drugs with these shaped molecules enables them to target and affect the right cells.
As it turns out, manufacturing a molecule to have a particular shape is a rather simple process.
Unfortunately, this is a very difficult question to answer just from knowing the chemical structure of the molecule.
Many drug discovery projects fail because of solubility issues.
This is where topology comes in.
Inrecent work, researchers used topological data analysis tools as a first step to producing such a map.
This article is republished fromThe ConversationbyIttay Weiss, Lecturer in Mathematics,University of Portsmouthunder a Creative Commons license.
