2024-10-04 08:45:19
The first complete diagram of all the neurons in an adult brain and all the connections between them has been created. Due to the enormous complexity of this type of work, the brain chosen was that of a fly, which has only 139,255 neurons and around 50 million connections between them.
The result is the work of a large international consortium of nearly 300 scientists, called the FlyWire Consortium, and resulted in two studies, published in the academic journal Nature. One is titled “Neuronal wiring diagram of an adult brain” and the first signatory is Sven Dorkenwald, of Princeton University in New Jersey, United States. The other is titled “Whole-brain annotation and multi-connectome cell typing of Drosophila” and the first signatory is Philipp Schlegel, from the Molecular Biology Laboratory of the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The consortium includes scientists from the University of Cambridge in the UK, the University of California at Los Angeles (US), the University of Vermont in the US and others.
The new neuronal map, from a fruit fly, is the first of all neurons in an adult animal brain with advanced locomotion and vision. In previous work, it was possible to create neuronal maps of much smaller entire brains, for example that of a fruit fly larva, which has only 3,016 neurons, and that of a nematode worm, which has 302 neurons.
The new map is a first and decisive step towards mapping other, larger and more complex brains. But it represents a useful advance in itself, since the fruit fly is widely used in research as a model organism, so that its brain map can be used in studies of other brains, including humans.
3D reproduction of the set of approximately 140,000 neurons in the brain of the female fruit fly examined. (Image: FlyWire.ai (data); Philipp Schlegel / University of Cambridge / MRC LMB (rendering))
The entire brain of a fly measures less than a millimeter. The researchers started with a female brain cut into seven thousand slices each just 40 nanometers thick, previously scanned using high-resolution electron microscopy.
Analyzing more than 100 terabytes of image data to extract the shapes of around 140,000 neurons and 50 million connections between them is too big a task to be done solely by humans. For this reason, the researchers enlisted the help of artificial intelligence, developed at Princeton University, to identify and map neurons and their connections to each other. The data was then carefully verified by human scientists, with the help of volunteers from the general public.
The FlyWire consortium has made the entire database of fly neuron maps available to the entire scientific community. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)
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