Brain Banks Provide a Valuable Resource for Comparative Studies

Washington Natural Primate Research Center. Lemur brains are sometimes available from the Duke University Lemur Center although these brains are frozen after death and are thus of limited use. Here we bring attention to the availability of the Primate Brain Bank in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The Primate Brain Bank is a department of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN). The brain bank was originally founded in 2000 by Prof. J. van Hooff and Dr. W.J. Netto of the Behavioral Biology Group of the Faculty of Biology at Utrecht University. Members of this faculty had been involved in primate research Recently, Iwaniuk [2010] noted the availability and usefulness of histological brain collections for comparative studies and stressed that such collections are often underused. One reason for this limited use may be that investigators want to process brain tissue in ways that are not represented in, especially, older brain collections. An alternative is to obtain whole brains or parts of brains from brain banks where brains and brain tissue are stored, usually after natural death, for future use by neuroscientists. Human brains are widely available. Some Old World monkey brains can be obtained from tissue programs at primate centers such as the University of Published online: March 2, 2011