Scientists Managed To Completely Map a Baby Fruit Fly's Brain

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: [S]cientists from the University of Cambridge and Johns Hopkins University announced that they'd finally mapped every single neuron and all the connections between them housed inside the brain of a fruit fly larva. The team's research was published this week in the journal Science. "If we want to understand who we are and how we think, part of that is understanding the mechanism of thought," says Johns Hopkins biomedical engineer Joshua T. Vogelstein in a press release. "And the key to that is knowing how neurons connect with each other." And there are a lot of neurons and connections to sort through. To complete this neurological map, scientists had to identify 3,016 neurons. But that pales in comparison to the number of connections between these neurons, which comes to a grand total of 548,000. They also identified 93 distinct neurons that differed in shape, function, and neurological connection. If this all sounds difficult, that's because it is. For 12 years, scientists had to painstakingly slice a brain into thousands of tissue samples, image them with an high-resolution electron microscope, and then piece them back together -- neuron by neuron. Understanding the inner workings of a fruit fly's brain may seem unrelated to the human mind, but scientists didn't choose this particular species based on its size or perceived simplicity -- rather, fruit flies actually share fundamental biology and a comparable genetic foundation with humans. This makes the map a perfect cornerstone upon which to explore some of the many mysteries of the human mind. "All brains are similar -- they are all networks of interconnected neurons," Marta Zaltic, a co-author on the study, told the BBC. "All brains of all species have to perform many complex behaviors: they all need to process sensory information, learn, select actions, navigate their environments, choose food, etc."

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