Would You like a feature Interview?
All Interviews are 100% FREE of Charge
Researchers have understood the structures of the brain and mapped them in some detail, but they still don’t know exactly how they process the data. For that, we need a detailed “circuit map” of the brain.
Scientists have now made just such a map of the most advanced organism ever, the larvae of the fruit fly. This diagram, called the connectome, represents her 3016 neurons and 548,000 synapses in the insect. neuroscience news Reported. This map will help researchers better understand how the brains of both insects and animals control behavior, learning, bodily functions, and more. The research could even have implications for improved AI networks.
“So far, we haven’t seen any brain structures, except in the nematode C. elegans, the lesser chordate tadpole, and the larvae of the marine annelid, all of which have hundreds of neurons.” the professor said. Marta Zlatic of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology said: “This means that neuroscience used to work mostly without schematics. We guess how computation is implemented without knowing the structure of the brain. It gives me a mechanical understanding of how it works.”
To create the map, the team scanned thousands of slices from the larval brain with an electron microscope, integrated them into a detailed map, and annotated all the neural connections. From there, they used computational tools to identify possible information flow pathways and types of ‘circuit motifs’ in insect brains. They even found that some structural features are very similar to state-of-the-art deep learning architectures.
Scientists have created detailed maps of the fruit fly brain, which is much more complex than the fruit fly larvae. However, these maps do not contain all the detailed connections necessary to create a true circuit map of the brain.
As a next step, the team will investigate structures used for behavioral functions such as learning and decision-making, and examine connectome activity during insects’ specific activities. Drosophila larvae are simple insects, but researchers expect to see similar patterns in other animals. “I think that just as genes are conserved across the animal kingdom, so are the basic circuit motifs that carry out these basic behaviors,” he said.