The work could ultimately help provide insight into how all kinds of animal brains, including our own, process a flood of sensory information and translate it into appropriate action. Jayaraman and his colleagues identified dozens of new neuron types and pinpointed neural circuits that appear to help flies make their way through the world.
But the data they have released so far is stunning in its detail, composing an atlas of tens of thousands of gnarled neurons in many crucial areas of the fly brain.Īnd now, in an enormous new paper, being published on Tuesday in the journal eLife, neuroscientists are beginning to show what they can do with it.īy analyzing the connectome of just a small part of the fly brain - the central complex, which plays an important role in navigation - Dr. The work, which is continuing, is time-consuming and expensive, even with the help of state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms. Since 2014, a team of scientists at Janelia, in collaboration with researchers at Google, have been mapping these neurons and synapses in an effort to create a comprehensive wiring diagram, also known as a connectome, of the fruit fly brain.
And their speck-size brains are tremendously complex, containing some 100,000 neurons and tens of millions of connections, or synapses, between them. “But, of course, flies lead quite rich lives.”įlies are capable of sophisticated behaviors, including navigating diverse landscapes, tussling with rivals and serenading potential mates. “Most people, I think, don’t even think of the fly as having a brain,” said Vivek Jayaraman, a neuroscientist at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia. The brain of a fruit fly is the size of a poppy seed and about as easy to overlook.
0 kommentar(er)
