The Most Complete Brain Map Ever Is Here: A Fly’s “Connectome“
Phoenix666 writes:
The Most Complete Brain Map Ever Is Here: A Fly's 'Connectome':
It took 12 years and at least $40 million to chart a region about 250m across.
When asked what's so special about Drosophila melanogaster, or the common fruit fly, Gerry Rubin quickly gets on a roll. Rubin has poked and prodded flies for decades, including as a leader of the effort to sequence their genome. So permit him to count their merits. They're expert navigators, for one, zipping around without crashing into walls. They have great memories too, he adds. Deprived of their senses, they can find their way around a room-much as you, if you were suddenly blindfolded, could probably escape through whichever door you most recently entered.
"Fruit flies are very skillful," he appraises. And all that skill, although contained in a brain the size of a poppy seed, involves some neural circuitry similar to our own, a product of our distant common ancestor. That's why, as director of Janelia Research Campus, part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he's spent the last 12 years leading a team that's mapping out the fly brain's physical wiring, down to the very last neuron.
Janelia researchers announced a major step in that quest on Wednesday, releasing a wiring diagram of the fly brain that contains 25,000 neurons and the 20 million connections between them. The so-called "connectome" corresponds to the fly's hemibrain, a region that's about 250 micrometers across-the size of a dust mite, or the thickness of two strands of hair. It's about a third of the total fly brain, and contains many of the critical regions responsible for memory, navigation, and learning.
Journal Reference:
A Connectome of the Adult Drosophila Central Brain [$], bioRxiv (DOI: 10.1101/2020.01.21.911859)
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