Scientists on Thursday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that could provide insight into the brains of the entire animal kingdom, including people.
The research details more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons – brain nerve cells – in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to understand how brains are connected and the signals underlying healthy brain function. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species.
“You might be asking why we should care about the brain of a fruit fly. My simple answer is that if we can really understand how a brain works, it will tell us something about all brains. is bound to tell,” said Princeton University professor of neuroscience and computer science Sebastian Seung, one of the co-leaders of the work in a series of studies published in the journal Nature.
While some people may be more interested in killing flies than studying them, some researchers found aesthetic satisfaction in looking at the brain of a fruit fly less than 0.04 inches (1 mm) wide.
“It’s beautiful,” said neuroscientist and research co-leader Gregory Jefferis of the University of Cambridge.
The map drawn by the researchers provided a wiring diagram for the brain of an adult fruit fly, known as a connectome. Similar research was previously done with simpler organisms, such as the worm Caenorhabditis elegans and the larval stage of the fruit fly. The adult fruit fly presented more complex behaviors to study through its brain wiring.
“One of the key questions we are addressing is how the wiring in the brain, its neurons and connections, can give rise to animal behavior,” said Princeton neuroscientist Mala Murthy, one of the co-leaders of the research. “
“And flies are an important model system for neuroscience. Their brains solve many of the same problems as ours… They perform sophisticated tasks such as walking and flying, learning and memory behavior, navigation, feeding, and even social behavior. Are able to behave.” “Interactions, which is a behavior that we study in our lab at Princeton,” Murthy said.
One study analyzed the brain circuits underlying walking and revealed how flies stop. Another analyzed the fly’s taste network and the aesthetic circuits behind behaviors such as when it uses a leg to remove dirt from its antennae. Another looked at the visual system including how the fly’s eyes process motion and color information. Still, another analyzed connectivity through the brain, discovering a large combination of “hub neurons” that may accelerate information flow.
The researchers created a map tracking the organization of the hemispheres and behavioral circuits inside the fly brain. They also identified the entire set of cell classes in its brain, pinpointed the different types of neurons and chemical connections – synapses – between these nerve cells, and looked at the types of chemicals secreted by the neurons.
The work was conducted by a large international collaboration of scientists known as the Flywire Consortium.
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