Hi readers!
Do you know that we as a nation are expert in fly hitting and keep hitting them the whole day because we have nothing else to do or we lack the capacity to do some productive work. However, there are people around us who could do things having the capacity to surprise the world. For example, Aoife Hilton: a digital journalist for ABC News in Brisbane, and a freelanced for several UK-based outlets, reported a story on October 3rd, 2024 in New York times about a team of scientists who mapped the brain of a fruit fly for the first time in a revolutionary research project with the objective to decode how brains are equipped and connected and how the signals underlying a healthy brain functions.
A large international collaboration of scientists known as the FlyWire Consortium worked on the project, which described more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neuron in the brain nerve cells of the insect that helped mapping the entire brain of the fruit fly. The study will help paving the way for mapping the brains of other species including humans. For details, please visit the following website
abc.net.au/news/scientists-map-fruit-fly-brain-in-neurobiological-milestone/104430502
Professor Sebastian Seung of Princeton University Neuroscience, who worked on the project, said,
“If we can truly understand how any brain functions, it’s bound to tell us something about all the brains.”
He further said, scientists imaged 7,000 “salami-sliced” (breaking up or segmenting a large study into two or more publications) sections of fruit fly brain whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster having a brain of less than one millimeter wide and is often used in neurobiological studies. University of Cambridge neuroscientist and research co-leader Gregory Jefferis said, “When we dive inside the brain, it looked incredibly complicated and intricate at microscopic level,” he told ABC News. The map devised by the researchers provided a wiring diagram known as a connectome, for the brain of an adult fruit fly.
The picture above is showing the largest neurons of the fruit fly brain connectome, mapped for the first time. (Credit: Tyler Sloan and Amy Sterling for Fly Wire)
The researchers shaped a map tracking the organization of the cerebral 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 (a structure in nervous system that allows a neuron to transmit an electrical or chemical signal to another neuron. It is the point at which nervous impulse passes from one neuron to another) between these nerve cells and looked at the types of chemicals secreted by the neurons.
Dr Jefferis said the project began “10 years ago” with imaging of 7,000 “salami-sliced” sections of a fruit fly brain. While dozens of researchers put in hours of work over a decade for the project, they also used artificial intelligence to trace out the sections automatically with machine vision.
He further said, the scientists could look at sensations, reflexes and memory in the fruit fly brain and have analyzed sight, taste, and motion.
One of the major questions that the scientist addressed is how the wiring in the brain, its neurons and connections can give rise to animal behavior? Princeton neuroscientist Mala Murthy, another research co-leader said, “flies are an important model system for neurosciences. Their brains solve many of the same problems we do.”
These kinds of maps really let us think about the mechanics of thought,” Dr Jefferis said.
However, he noted
“The difference is pretty dramatic” between human and fruit fly brains.”
The human brain is a million times bigger than the fly brain in terms of neurons. So, the scientists have ways to go before mapping it.
“When we understand it, hopefully then we can rewire it or fix it in some cases where things go wrong.”
Dear readers! Have you realized that thigs have gone extremely wrong with us. Can we now hope that one of these days, there will be a mechanism to find out and fix the problem with the nations like the one we belong to? Keep your figure crossed.
See you next week. Take care, bye
