Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people.
The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species.
“You might be asking why we should care about the brain of a fruit fly. My simple answer is that if we can truly understand how any brain functions, it’s bound to tell us something about all brains,” said Princeton University professor of neuroscience and computer science Sebastian Seung, one of the co-leaders of the work published in a series of studies in the journal Nature.
Photo: AFP / Tyler Sloan and Amy Sterling FlyWire, Princeton University
While some people might be more interested in swatting flies than studying them, some of the researchers found aesthetic satisfaction peering at the fruit fly brain, less than 1mm wide.
“It’s beautiful,” University of Cambridge neuroscientist and research coleader Gregory Jefferis said.
The map devised by the researchers provided a wiring diagram, known as a connectome, for the brain of an adult fruit fly. Similar research previously was conducted with simpler organisms, such as the worm Caenorhabditis elegans and the fruit fly’s larval stage. The adult fruit fly presented more complicated behaviors to study through its brain wiring.
“One of the major questions we’re addressing is how the wiring in the brain, its neurons and connections, can give rise to animal behavior,” said Princeton neuroscientist Mala Murthy, another of the coleaders of the research.
“And flies are an important model system for neurosciences. Their brains solve many of the same problems we do... They’re capable of sophisticated behaviors like the execution of walking and flying, learning and memory behaviors, navigation, feeding and even social interactions, which is a behavior that we studied in my lab at Princeton,” Murthy added.
One of the studies analyzed brain circuits underlying walking and discovered how flies halt.
Another analyzed the fly’s taste network and grooming circuits behind behavior such as when it uses a leg to remove dirt from its antennae. Another looked at the visual system including how the fly’s eyes process motion and color information. Still another one analyzed connectivity through the brain, discovering a large assemblage of “hub neurons” that may speed up information flow.
The researchers fashioned a map tracking the organization of the hemispheres and behavioral circuits inside the fly’s brain. They also identified the full set of cell classes in its brain, pinpointing different varieties of neurons and chemical connections — synapses — between these nerve cells, and looked at the types of chemicals secreted by the neurons.
The work was conducted by a large international collaboration of scientists known as the FlyWire Consortium.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they