The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the new BRAIN Connects program, aimed to support research projects that will transform our knowledge of the connections made between every cell in the brain. Two PNI scientists, David Tank and Sebastian Seung, are among a group working to develop technologies to map these connections across the brain. Their project aims to produce a large-scale synapse-level connectome that includes all the main areas of the mouse hippocampus. The hippocampus is of particular interest as it is an essential part of the circuit underlying spatial navigation and memory, and shows the earliest impairments and degeneration related to Alzheimer’s disease.