Scientists have taken a step closer to understanding consciousness by releasing the world’s first complete, high-resolution brain map of a baby fruit fly. This is the most complex and complex connectome of any animal brain ever constructed, paving the way to revolutionary new frontiers in the development of artificial intelligence and neuroscience.
This new wiring map is the culmination of a collaborative effort by scientists from Cambridge University and Johns Hopkins University, and is the fourth complete connectome to date.Previously, the much simpler brains of microscopic roundworms Caenorhabditis eleganssea squirt larvae snails and sea worms Platynereis dumerilii Although mapped, they feature hundreds of neurons and thousands of synapses (connections) at most. Earlier Drosophila connectomes were partial photographs.
High-resolution connectome imaging of Drosophila larvae, Drosophila melanogasterdisplays 3,016 neurons and 548,000 connections between them. It’s been long awaited for scientists eager to fully map the brains of insects that share much of their basic biology with humans.
“Fifty years later, this is the first brain connectome,” said Joshua T. Vogelstein, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University. I have.”
This groundbreaking work took 12 years to complete, and the enormous complexity of the processes involved is a sight to behold. First, the team used electron microscopy to visually slice the brains of six-hour-old female Drosophila larvae into thousands, not just a few, sections about the size of a grain of salt.
The electron microscope captured images of each slice, but imaging alone took one day for each of the 3,016 neurons.
A collaborative study by scientists from the University of Cambridge and Johns Hopkins across disciplines such as neuroscience, microbiology and computer science has seen a fully realized brain map at high resolution. The images show every neuron and connection, providing interesting insights into thought processing and behavior, including how the busiest circuits enter and leave the brain’s learning centers.
Drosophila has complex learning and decision-making behaviors and is one of the most studied animals in neuroscience research. In addition, the maps revealed circuit functions reminiscent of machine learning architectures, and could even inform new artificial intelligences.
“What we learn about Drosophila code will have implications for human code,” Vogelstein said. “That’s what we want to understand: how to write programs that connect to the networks of the human brain.”
Scientists are now working to map the brains of adult fruit flies and hope to compare developmental changes. Vogelstein said work to map the mouse brain is underway and could be done within the next decade. But it’s estimated to be a million times his size for a Drosophila larvae, so it’s a colossal task.
Current computational tools can track millions of neural pathways, but they cannot track the trillions of neural pathways that the human brain is thought to have. ) is unlikely to be seen for very long.
A study was published in a journal chemistrySee how the Connectome was built and see the final, impressive model in the video below.
Complete brain map of Drosophila larvae
Complete set of insect brain neurons
Source: Johns Hopkins University
