"And this activity is an expression of this structure.Assistant Professor of Bioengineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Washington "Every idea, every memory, every movement, every decision you ever made comes from the activity of neurons in your brain," da Costa says. "If your radio breaks," da Costa says, "if someone has a wiring diagram of your radio, they'll be in a better position to fix it."Ī human connectome will also help scientists answer some basic questions, like how we learn and why we behave the way we do, he says. 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.ĭespite the difficulty, mapping more complex brains is worth the effort, da Costa says, because it could eventually help scientists understand how a human brain can be affected by disorders like schizophrenia. "We started by trying to map the connectivity of a millimeter cube of mouse cortex, which is kind of a grain of sand but has one billion connections -– 100,000 neurons, and 4 kilometers of cable," da Costa says. And even that is a huge challenge, says Nuno Maçarico da Costa, an associate investigator at the Allen Institute in Seattle who was not involved in the study on fruit fly larvae.
So researchers at the Allen Institute in Seattle are working on an easier next goal: mapping the connectome of a mouse. Those tools are enough to trace millions of connections, Vogelstein explains, but not the trillions of connections found in a human brain. The fruit fly larva connectome is an important advance because it's "closer in many regards to a human brain than the other ones," says Joshua Vogelstein, an author of the study and an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University.įor example, "there's regions that correspond to decision making, there's regions that correspond to learning, there's regions that correspond to navigation," Vogelstein says. Previous wiring diagrams, known as connectomes, were limited to worms and tadpoles with just a few hundred neurons and a few thousand synaptic connections. The brain, from a fruit fly larva, contained 3016 neurons connected by 548,000 synapses, the team reported Thursday in the journal Science.
Scientists have created the first detailed wiring diagram of an insect brain. Both have remarkably complex brains, scientists say, with different regions devoted to decision-making, learning and navigation. What looks like a pin-headed critter on the right is actually a larval version of the fruit fly on the left.
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