SCIENTISTS HAVE CREATED THE FIRST COMPLETE MAP OF AN (INSECT’S) BRAIN

Scientists have managed to completely map a brain the size of a grain of salt — and it’s a much bigger achievement than this statement makes it sound.

With what is the very first complete map of an insect’s brain, scientists have made a big leap in the endeavor of one day mapping the human brain — and perhaps finding out if Elon Musk is actually an alien.

In a joint effort between Johns Hopkins University and the University of Cambridge, a team of scientists managed to produce the connectome of a fruit fly larva — containing precisely 3,016 neurons and 548,000 synapses.

The big picture: They believe that this study can be used as a reference to one day map the vastly more complex human brain, that contains about 100 billion neurons and as many as 1,000 trillion synapses.

A connectome is what we commonly refer to as a “map of the brain,” and the task is still extremely difficult even with today’s technology. With these maps, scientists hope to study the function of every single highway of the brain.

“Until now, the actual circuit patterns involved in most brain computations have been unknown. Now we can start gaining a mechanistic understanding of how the brain works,” said Professor Marta Zlatic, who co-led the research.

The scientists chose a fruit fly larva as the subject because the insect shares much of its “fundamental biology” with humans, and we have already sequenced its genome. The larva chosen was merely six-hour-old when the researchers began capturing images of its brain — a process that went on for a year and a half.

The team spent a total of 12 years producing the connectome, generating thousands of images using an electron microscope. They used a computer-assisted program to pinpoint the neurons and synapses, followed by manually checking them.

The team suggested that the brain’s wiring was multilayered, with co-author Michael Winding describing it as “a nice, nested structure,” speaking to Nature.

While the previous maps were limited to simple organisms such as tadpoles and worms, the fruit fly larva presents a much more complicated structure. “There’s regions that correspond to decision making, there’s regions that correspond to learning, there’s regions that correspond to navigation,” a study author told NPR.

These results are only the tip of the iceberg, however, as scientists hope to study the circuits of more complex creatures of the animal kingdom. The team suggests that the next step is to map the brain of an adult Drosophila, and in the future train AI to map the brains of other species – but much faster.

“One can now use it to train machine learning to do it much faster,” says Zlaatic.

Seems like ChatGPT is lurking in the background, looking to snatch the job given the first chance.