Scientists have created the first detailed wiring diagram of an insect brain. The brain, from a fruit fly larva, contained 3016 neurons connected by 548,000 synapses, the team reported Thursday in the journal Science.
But the challenges scientists faced in producing the fruit fly larva connectome show just how far they still have to go to map a human brain, which contains more than 80 billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synapses.Researchers have focused on connectomes because a brain is so much more than just a collection of neurons.
The brain of a fruit fly larva, like a human brain, has a right and left side. But when researchers mapped the connections in the insect brain,"one surprise [was] how similar the right and the left sides are," Vogelstein says. The team began by slicing a single tiny brain the size of a grain of salt into thousands of very thin sections.
Those tools are enough to trace millions of connections, Vogelstein explains, but not the trillions of connections found in a human brain. It took 12 days just to slice up that one tiny cube, which represents about only about one five-hundredth of a complete mouse brain, he says.
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