The wiring of one insect’s brain no longer contains much uncharted territory.
All of the nerve cells — and virtually every connection between them — in a larval fruit fly brain have now been mapped, researchers report in the March 10 Science. It’s the most complex whole brain wiring diagram yet created.
Previously, just three organisms — a sea squirt and two types of worm — had their brain circuitry fully diagrammed to this resolution. But the brains of those creatures have only a few hundred neurons. The scientists who conducted the new study wanted to understand much more complicated brains.
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Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) share a wide range of behaviors with humans, including integrating sensory information and learning. Larvae perform nearly all the same actions as adult flies — except for some, like flying and mating — but have smaller brains, making data collection much faster (SN: 7/19/18).
The idea for this project came 12 years ago, says neuroscientist Marta Zlatic of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. At that time, she and her colleagues captured electron microscope images of the entire larval fruit fly brain. They then stitched those images together in a computer and manually traced each neuron to create a 3-D rendering of the cells. Finally, the team found the connections where information gets passed between the cells, and even determined the sending and receiving ends.
The researchers identified more than 3,000 neurons and about 550,000 connections, known as synapses.
Neurons transmit information to one another in circuits. Exploring the neurons’ connectivity…
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