A scientific team supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) unveiled the first complete map of the neural connections of the common fruit fly brain. The map provides a wiring diagram, known as a connectome, and is the largest and most complete connectome of an adult animal ever created. This work offers critical information about how brains are wired and the signals that underlie healthy brain functions.
The study, which details over 50 million connections between more than 130,000 neurons, appears as part of a package of nine papers in the journal Nature . The diminutive fruit fly is surprisingly sophisticated and has long served as a powerful model for understanding the biological underpinnings of behavior. This milestone not only provides researchers a new set of tools for understanding how the circuits in the brain drive behavior but importantly serves as a forerunner to ongoing BRAIN-funded efforts to map the connections of larger mammalian and human brains.
" John Ngai, Ph.D., Director, The BRAIN Initiative®, National Institutes of Health The connectome map details the full set of cell classes in the fruit fly brain, identifying different types of neurons and chemical connections, or synapses, between neurons.
It also provides insight into the type of neurotransmitter (chemicals such as dopamine or serotonin) secreted by each neuron. The researchers also created a map of projections between brain regions, known as a projectome, that tracks the organization of.
