The researchers identified the full range of cell classes in the fruit fly's brain.
Washington:
Scientists announced a milestone in neurobiological research Thursday by mapping the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that could provide insight into the brains of the entire animal kingdom, including humans.
The research mapped more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons – brain nerve cells – in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and which is often used in neurobiological studies. The research attempted to decipher how the brain is connected and which signals underlie healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species.
“You may be wondering why we should worry about a fruit fly's brain. My simple answer is that if we can truly understand how a brain functions, this will certainly tell us something about all brains,” says professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. computer science Sebastian Seung, one of the co-leaders of the work published in a series of studies in the journal Nature.
While some people may be more interested in swatting flies than studying them, some researchers found aesthetic satisfaction in peering at the fruit fly's brain, which is less than 1 mm wide.
“It's beautiful,” says neuroscientist and research leader Gregory Jefferis of the University of Cambridge.
The map the researchers devised provided a wiring diagram, known as a connectome, for the brain of an adult fruit fly. Similar research has previously been conducted with simpler organisms, such as the worm Caenorhabditis elegans and the larval stage of the fruit fly. The adult fruit fly showed more complicated behavior to study through its brain wiring.
“One of the key questions we're addressing is how the wiring in the brain, its neurons and connections, can give rise to animal behavior,” said Princeton neuroscientist Mala Murthy, one of the study's co-leaders.
“And flies are an important model system for neuroscience. Their brains solve many of the same problems we do… They are capable of advanced behaviors such as walking and flying, learning and memory, navigation, feeding and even social behavior interactions, a behavior we studied in my laboratory at Princeton,” Murthy added.
One of the studies analyzed the brain circuits underlying walking and discovered how flies stop. Another analyzed the fly's taste network and the grooming circuits behind behavior, such as when it uses a leg to remove dirt from its antennae. Another looked at the visual system, including how the fly's eyes process motion and color information. Yet another analyzed connectivity through the brain and discovered a large collection of 'hub neurons' that can speed up the flow of information.
The researchers created a map that tracks the organization of the hemispheres and behavioral circuits in the fly's brain. They also identified the full range of cell classes in the brain, pinpointing different types of neurons and chemical connections (synapses) between these nerve cells, and looking at the types of chemicals secreted by the neurons.
The work was carried out by a large international collaboration of scientists known as the FlyWire Consortium.
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