by Scientists have created the first map of all the neurons in the brain of an adult fly.
The research team says this first wiring diagram of a fruit fly’s entire brain provides new insights into the brain connections that control a fly’s sensory perceptions, memory and even mating rituals.
“The closer you look, the more surprised we are as scientists,” said Gregory Jefferis, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge and one of the co-leaders of the research.
“If we want to understand how the brain works, we need a mechanistic understanding of how all the neurons fit together and make you think. “In most brains, we have no idea how these networks work,” Jefferis added opinion.
“Flies can do all sorts of complicated things like walk, fly, navigate, and the males sing to the females. Brain circuit diagrams are a first step in understanding anything we are interested in – how we control our movement, answer the phone or recognize a friend,” he added.
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The 3D models were created from a dead fly’s brain, which was cut into 7,000 separate 40-nanometer sections using high-resolution electron microscopy. A whole fly brain is less than a millimeter wide.
Researchers said examining the brain of a dead fly helped them discover significant similarities with previous smaller samples of a fly’s brain and concluded that not every brain is a unique structure.
The researchers analyzed 100 terabytes (TB) of images and about 100 laptops of memory to map them to the 140,000 neurons and over 50 million connections.
AI helped process the imaged sections, as they would otherwise have taken 4,000 human years to produce, the team said.
The researchers also enlisted the help of more than 280 researchers around the world to proofread the data.
“This largest brain map to date was only possible thanks to technological advances that did not seem possible ten years ago. It is a true testament to how innovation can advance research,” said Marta Costa, a researcher at the University of Cambridge.
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“First step” towards a better understanding of the brain
The researchers say mapping the entire fly brain is an important first step toward completing larger brains.
“We hope that in the future it will be possible to compare what happens when something goes wrong in our brain, for example in mental illness,” said Mala Murthy, one of the co-leaders of the research at Princeton University.
The entire database is freely available to all researchers hoping to better understand how a healthy brain works.
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However, creating a circuit diagram of a human brain will not be possible in the foreseeable future.
A human brain is many times more complicated than the brain of a fruit fly and we are still far from being able to attempt this feat.
“There is a million-fold difference in neurons between the fly brain and the human brain. And in fact, the volume of their brains, which is very important for imaging and image processing to create these brain maps, is even a little bit larger,” Jefferis said.
Consideration is already being given to working on much smaller mammals such as mice.
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