Some people may have seen the image of a fruit fly brain published last month (January 2020), by C. Shan Xu, and a large number of coworkers, and picked up by many media outlets. The ‘map’ or 3-D graphic (see below) was compiled by a team of scientists, called FlyEM, from the company Google, and from the Janelia Research Campus at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the USA. It is a ‘wiring diagram’ of the fly’s brain, or at least in a good chuck of it, showing ~25,000 neurons (brain cells) and more than twenty-million connections, or synapses. A so-called ‘functional connectome’ of the brain of Drosophila melanogaster.

The common fruit fly or vinegar fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is a tiny little fly, less than 2.5 mm in length (see below). Nevertheless, its complete central nervous system (CNS) has about 100,000 neurons and perhaps, 80-100 million connections between them.

These 100,000 nerve cells are packed into the brain of this fly, which is about the size of a poppy seed (or ∼8 × 10⁷ μm³). It is worth keeping these numbers in mind when we come to compare it with the human brain.

The first ‘functional connectome’ of an animal ‘brain’ was achieved in 1986 for the much simpler creature: the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, which only has about 302 neurons in its nervous system, and some 7,600 synapses. So the connectome for Drosophila is a massive leap forward; from 7,600 connections in 1986, to 20 million connections in 2020. The synapses, or connections between the different brain cells, is what gives the nervous system its complexity. It is said that this is where memory is stored in humans.

The human brain has approximately 100 billion neurons and 10¹⁵ connections. That is 1,000,000,000,000,000 connections (apparently it is called a Quadrillion). The step up from 10⁸ to 10¹⁵ is enormous, so one would assume that the human connectome is still a long way off. However, given the current rate of progress, I am confident that a complete ‘wiring diagram’ of the human brain, perhaps your brain (!) will happen some day.

The raison dêtre for doing this work, is that once you have a complete synaptic ‘wiring diagram’, it may be possible to determine the precise causes and controls of specific behaviours, for example by experimentally switching on and off individual neurons or neural circuits. Brave New World indeed!

Links

https://www.janelia.org/news/unveiling-the-biggest-and-most-detailed-map-of-the-fly-brain-yet

https://www.hhmi.org/news/complete-fly-brain-imaged-at-nanoscale-resolution

https://www.newsarchyuk.com/neuroscience-the-largest-and-most-detailed-map-of-brain-cells-yet-science-and-technology-2/

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/22/21076806/google-janelia-flyem-fruit-fly-brain-map-hemibrain-connectome

References

Zheng, Zhihao, et al. “A complete electron microscopy volume of the brain of adult Drosophila melanogaster.” Cell 174.3 (2018): 730-743.

Xu, C. Shan, et al. “A Connectome of the Adult Drosophila Central Brain.” bioRxiv (2020).