Researchers have created a detailed map of an insect’s brain for the first time, which shows every single neuron and how they’re wire together. The brain is of the fruit fly larva.
The map is a result of over decade-long research by a team from the UK, US, and Germany in breaking down the complex makeup of an insect’s brain and finding each neural connection.
The neuroscience breakthrough has brought scientists closer to understanding the mechanism of thought.
Joshua T. Vogelstein, a Johns Hopkins biomedical engineer, said :
“If we want to understand who we are and how we think, part of that is understanding the mechanism of thought. The key to that is knowing how neurons connect with each other,”.
Research into brain mapping has been going on for decades and it’s a difficult task since it requires slicing the brain into hundreds or thousands of individual tissue samples, all of which have to be image with electron microscopes before the painstaking process of reconstructing all those pieces.
Led by Johns Hopkins University, researchers from three different countries, produce the first detail neural diagram of an insect’s brain that could enhance future brain research and develop new ways to learn its architecture.
The study target Drosophila melanogaster larva, which shares much of its fundamental biology with humans, including a comparable genetic foundation.
The insect has rich learning and decision-making behaviors as well.
Researchers map 3,016 neurons and every connection between them, which came to nearly 5,48,000.
Joshua T. Vogelstein said :
“It’s been 50 years and this is the first brain connectome. It’s a flag in the sand that we can do this. Everything has been working up to this,”.
Researchers at Cambridge University create high-resolution images of the brain and manually studied them to find individual neurons.
And the research was span over 12 years, imaging alone took about a day per neuron.
The data was then handed to researchers at Johns Hopkins, who spent more than three years using the original code they create to analyze the brain’s connectivity.
Researchers team also develop techniques to find groups of neurons based on share connectivity patterns.
The Researchers team then came together to chart every neuron and every connection and categorize each neuron by the role it plays in the brain.
What they found was that the brain’s busiest circuits were those that led to and away from neurons of the learning center.
Researchers said that the fruit fly larva work show circuit features that were strikingly reminiscent of prominent and powerful machine learning architectures.
Joshua T. Vogelstein said :
“What we learned about code for fruit flies will have implications for the code for humans. That’s what we want to understand—how to write a program that leads to a human brain network,”.
