A complete map of the brain of a fruit fly larva. Credit: Johns Hopkins University.
Brains never cease to fascinate us. He can do remarkable things and yet he’s just slime. It irritates us that we still understand very little about brains. It is a typical black box for us. We see the inputs, we see the outputs, but we only guess what is actually going on there. But there are things we can do that bring us closer to understanding “depth thinking.” For example, we can map brains.
Joshua T. Vogelstein. Kredit: Johns Hopkins University.
This is exactly how an international team of experts, led by people from the American Johns Hopkins University and the British University of Cambridge, proceeded. They did it long and thoroughly. The result of their work is a breathtaking map of the brain of a common fruit fly larva (Drosophila melanogaster). It shows each neural connection (neural connection) in the larva’s brain, and the creators talk about the roughest result of connectomics to date (connectomics).
Why an apple juicer? It is a pathetic fly, but at the same time an essential laboratory model, even when it comes to the organization and development of the brain. The fruit fly brain has now become the most complex brain mapped. It opens the door to further brain research, in animals with an even more complex nervous system. In addition, it will serve as an inspiration for the development of even more intelligent artificial intelligences.
Logo. Kredit: Johns Hopkins University.
A map of the brain of a fruit fly larva shows a total of 3,016 neurons and all the neural connections between them, of which there are 548,000. As the leader of the research team, Joshua Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins, praises, after 50 years of intensive brain research, we have the first complete picture of the insect brain. Their team pushed the flag of the brain explorers quite a bit further.
Mapping even the insect brain is very challenging, even with the most modern technologies. They had to slice the brains of many fruit fly larvae into hundreds of thousands of very thin slices, all of which they observed in detail with an electron microscope. Then they virtually put together the entire brain of a fruit fly larva, neuron by neuron. It took them about 12 years, which is very roughly equivalent to one neuron per day.
Another important target is the brain of a laboratory mouse, which is a million times larger than the brain of a fruit fly larva. As for our pride, a simple guess suggests that mapping the human brain will be a huge undertaking. The authors of the study believe that none of the contemporaries may experience this. On the other hand, in similar cases it has been shown many times that it is not good to underestimate technological progress. For example, if we put artificial intelligence behind an electron microscope, we may have a map of the human brain sooner than we can imagine today.
Video: Complete Set of Neurons in an Insect Brain
Video: Complete Brain Map of Fruit Fly Larva
Literature
Johns Hopkins University 9. 3. 2023.
