Scientists Unveil First Complete Map Of Insect Brain
American and European neuroscientists have for the first time prepared the brain connectome of a Drosophila larvae, a complete map of all connections between nerve cells in the central nervous system of this invertebrate. The study of this map will reveal the mechanisms of the brain of insects, the press service of the UK Department of Research and Innovation (UKRI) said on Thursday.
An international team led by Johns Hopkins University and the University of Cambridge has created a stunningly detailed diagram tracing every neural connection in the brain of a fruit fly larva, an archetypal scientific model with a brain comparable to that of a human.
The work will likely form the basis of future brain research and inspire new machine learning architectures.
“If we want to understand who we are and how we think, part of that is understanding how we think,” said senior author Joshua T. Vogelstein, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in data-driven projects.
This team’s connectome of a baby fruit fly, the larva of Drosophila melanogaster, is the most complete, as well as the most extensive, map of the entire insect brain ever created. It includes 3016 neurons and each connection between them: 548,000.
In the end, the whole team mapped out each neuron and each connection, and classified each neuron according to the role it plays in the brain. They found that the busiest circuits in the brain were those that led to and from the training center neurons.
