The New Indian Express ·
Scientists map 300 million connections in fruit fly brain
Researchers have completed a detailed map of every neuron and neural connection in the brain of a male fruit fly, creating the second complete connectome of the species. The work gives scientists a new tool to study how brains process information at the level of individual neurons and their connections.
The project was a collaboration between biologists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus and computer scientists at Google. The male fly connectome follows the completion of a female Drosophila connectome earlier this year, allowing researchers to compare the complete neural wiring of males and females of the same species.
A connectome maps the location of neurons and the synapses connecting them. Although the fruit fly’s nervous system contains about 150,000 neurons, researchers identified more than 300 million individual synaptic connections in the brain, highlighting the complexity of even a relatively small nervous system.
