Mapping Out the Most Advanced Brain
Scientists have just made a major breakthrough in understanding the brain – they have created an incredible map of the brains inside fruit flies! The research team was led by Johns Hopkins University and the University of Cambridge, and this map is considered to be the most advanced one ever seen. Fruit flies are an important scientific model since their brains are very similar to ours.
Today (March 10, 2023), a paper was published in the journal Science that could help us with learning new things about brains and forming new ways to do machine-learning.
Joshua T. Vogelstein, a Johns Hopkins biomedical engineer says that to understand ourselves and our thoughts, it is important to explore how our brains connect with each other. He calls this exploring “connectomics” which studies how neurons connect to each other.
In the 1970s scientists studied a roundworm for 14 years to make an early map of a brain. Even though maps of brains have been made for flies, mice and humans since then, these are only small parts. Detailed maps have only been done on creatures with fewer than a few thousand neurons, like roundworms, larval sea squirts, and larvae from marine worms.
This video shows a map of 3,016 neurons inside the brain of a baby fruit fly. It also shows every one of the 548,000 connections between these neurons, which is the most complete map of any insect brain ever made!
“This is the first time anyone has ever completed a brain connectome in 50 years. It’s as if we have planted a flag and said we can do this. Everything had been leading up to this moment.” said Vogelstein.
Mapping a whole brain is really hard and takes a long time, even with the best tools available today. To get an exact picture of the inside of a brain needs you cut it into small pieces and check each piece in detail with an electron microscope before piecing them back together again one by one. It took over 10 years to map out a baby fruit fly’s brain this way! The brain of a mouse is many times larger than a fruit fly which means it would be almost impossible to map anything as complex as human brains for many years or maybe not even possible until we die.
The researchers chose to study the fruit fly larva because it is similar to a human in many ways, including its genetic makeup. It also exhibits great decision-making abilities, making it useful for research. Plus, its small size makes it easier to observe and better understand how its brain works.
The incredibly difficult task of imaging and tracing a single neuron took the University of Cambridge and Johns Hopkins a whopping 12 years to complete! It took them about one day to get a really good image of just one neuron, then they had to go in and manually work out which specific neurons it was and how they were connected together.
Cambridge had some information which they gave to the Johns Hopkins team. The team there worked on it for three years by writing special computer programs. They used these programs to figure out how different parts of the brain are connected and also how signals can travel from one part to another within the brain.
In the end, a team of scientists mapped out every single neuron (a type of brain cell) as well as its different connections. They saw that some areas in the brain seemed to be really busy, especially the parts related to learning.
The team found that neurons communicate with each other within a specific hemisphere or area of the brain and also between different hemispheres or areas.
Johns Hopkins scientists have figured out how to study the brain of a mouse. Their new methods and coding can help people look into even bigger brains and maps. Even though it is difficult, scientists are working on creating a map of the adult fruit fly brain. Benjamin Pedigo from Johns Hopkins University thinks his work will help us understand different ways that brains connect or “wire”. As more information about fly and other animal brains comes in, Pedigo hopes we get better insight into their connections.
The research with fruit fly larvae showed that their brains had some features that looked a lot like the way computers and robots can think. The researchers hope to use this new knowledge to make better computer systems that can learn.
According to researcher Vogelstein, understanding how fruit fly brains work could help us build computers that imitate how humans think. That’s what they want to try to do—write a program which can generate human brain networks.
Researchers have recently published a paper titled “The Connectome of an Insect Brain” in the scientific journal Science. The team was composed of 17 people, including Michael Winding, Benjamin D. Pedigo, Christopher L. Barnes and 14 other experts from all around the world. They worked together to study how neurons in an insect brain are connected and how this connection affects the way it works.
The authors of this passage are Michael Winding, Christopher L. Barnes, Heather G. Patsolic, Youngser Park, Tom Kazimiers, Akira Fushiki, Ingrid V. Andrade, Avinash Khandelwal, Javier Valdes-Aleman, Feng Li, Nadine Randel, Elizabeth Barsotti, Ana Correia, Richard D. Fetter, Volker Hartenstein, Carey E. Priebe, Albert Cardona and Marta Zlatic.
This piece of research was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome Trust, NIH, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Air Force Research Laboratory, National Science Foundation, and more.
