They complete the map of the insect brain, which is a great achievement for neuroscience.

brain are networks of interconnected neurons and all brain of all species must perform complex activities such as navigating the environment, selecting food, or escaping from predators. Now the scientific team has managed to draw the first map of the human brain. insect.

This is a representation of neural wiring brain one vinegar fly larva is, in the words of those in charge, a “historic achievement” for neurologywhich brings scientists closer to the “true understanding” of the mechanism of thinking, opens the door for future research in the field of brain and inspire new machine learning architectures.

pioneering research

It is the largest complete brain connectome – a diagram of neural connections – described to date. The details are published in the journal Science.

Behind this painstaking study, which lasted 12 years, is a team from Johns Hopkins University (USA) and Cambridge (UK).

“If we want to understand who we are and how we think, part of that is understanding how we think,” says Joshua T. Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University, for whom knowing how neurons connect to each other is key.

First attempt to map brain – A 14-year study of Ascaris, begun in the 1970s, led to a partial map and a Nobel Prize.

Since then, partial connectomes have been mapped in many systems, including flies, mice and even humans, but these reconstructions often represent only a small part of the entire brain, explains Johns Hopkins.

Complete connectomes have been obtained only in a few small species with a few hundred or thousands of neurons: roundworms, ascidian larvae, and marine annelids larvae.

“It means that neurology It worked for the most part without circuit maps,” summarizes Marta Zlatich from a British university. “Without knowing the structure brainwe are guessing how the computation is implemented, but now we can begin to mechanically understand how the computation works. brain”, explain.

Far from large mammals

Current technology, he adds, is not yet advanced enough to map the connectomes of higher animals such as large mammals.

However, “all brains are similar – they are networks of interconnected neurons – and that’s it.” brain all species have to perform many complex actions: process sensory information, learn, choose actions, navigate the environment, choose food, recognize their own kind, or escape from predators.”

Brood connectome vinegar fly”Drosophila melanogaster”, is the most complete and extensive map of the brain A insect. It includes 3016 neurons and all connections between them: 548 thousand.

For a complete picture at the cellular level brain it must be broken down into hundreds or thousands of individual tissue samples, each of which must be analyzed using electron microscopes, before the laborious process of reconstructing the fragments, neuron by neuron, into a complete and accurate portrait of a person can begin. brain.

The team has chosen vinegar fly larva (or fruit) because to be insectthe species shares much of its fundamental biology with humans, including a comparable genetic base.

The work lasted 12 years; imaging alone took approximately one day per neuron.

The researchers scanned thousands of sections of the larva’s brain using a high-resolution electron microscope and reconstructed the resulting images into a map, carefully annotating the connections between neurons.

They classified each neuron according to the function it performs and found, for example, that the most active circuits in brain it was they who went to the neurons of the training center and back.

They also developed computer tools to identify possible information flow paths and different types of circuits.

The work showed circuit characteristics that “strikingly” resembled machine learning architectures, so the team hopes that continued research could inspire new AI systems.

What have we learned about the code vinegar fly it will make a difference to human code,” Vogelstein says. “That’s what we want to understand: how to write a program that controls the network of the human brain.”

The methods and codes developed here are available to anyone trying to map an even larger animal brain.

It is estimated that brain mice are a million times larger than breeding vinegar flywhich means that the possibility of its display in the near future is unlikely.

However, scientists hope to get it right, they say, perhaps in the next decade. EFE

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