Second complete map of a fruit fly brain completed
Researchers announced the second complete map of a fruit fly brain, a male connectome, providing a tool to accelerate neurobiology research.
The connectome also offers an opportunity for scientific discovery on its own, as a connectome of a female Drosophila had been completed earlier this year.
The new work involved a collaboration between biologists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus and computer scientists at Google, both of whom acknowledged that neither could have done the project without the other.
Preparing an entire brain for imaging at the necessary resolution requires a distinct set of skills, as does interpreting what those images indicate. Building a complete picture of the hundreds of millions of synapses in a brain as small as the fruit fly's is a task that cannot be achieved by humans in a manageable amount of time.
The people behind the effort expect that in the long term, the work will be worth it, as the connectome could give neurobiologists a valuable tool for understanding how the brain works. The work also provided the team the opportunity to refine tools that are likely to be applied to ever-more-complex nervous systems, including, potentially, those of vertebrates.