Brains are an amazingly complicated organ and they have evolved to allow all sorts of animals to perform many different tasks. The fact that brains come in many different shapes and sizes makes them even more festinating.
While countless hours have gone into studying the brain, scientists still don’t know a fraction of what there is to be known. Fortunately, an international research consortium has recently completed a project that will take this knowledge forward.
They have released the first ever complete diagram of an entire fruit fly brain. Sure, fruit flies are very small, and their brains are almost microscopic, but they are still surprisingly complicated. Each fruit fly brain has 139,255 neurons, which are wired together by more than 50 million synapses, making them quite complex. Of course, this is almost nothing compared to the billions of neurons in a human brain, but this is certainly an important step forward.
This project took several years, and was completed thanks to hundreds of people around the world. The project is known as the FlyWire Consortium, and it started out with the team taking 21 million images of the brain of an adult female fruit fly. From there, the images were fed through a specialized artificial intelligence, which aligned the images and created 3D reconstructions of each individual neuron.
From there, the hard work began. Each of the images needed to be ‘proofread’ by humans to ensure everything was perfect. The consortium put this work out to hundreds of researchers and scientists who all worked together to accomplish this goal. Even with the many hands, it still took a long time to complete. Dr. Shelli Avenevoli, acting director of NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health, explained in a statement:
“In 2021, only 15 percent of the neurons had been proofread. Opening proofreading to the larger scientific community studying the fruit fly brain greatly accelerated how fast we were able to complete this connectome.”
One of the best things about this project is that they have published the 3D representation of the neurons for people to explore. This is very useful for scientists who are studying the brain as it gives them immediate access to details that were previously impossible. It is also fun for regular people to be able to see in detail how a brain really works.
For example, in this video you can see someone ‘floating’ through the fly’s auditory neurons. These are the cells that the fruit fly used to detect the songs of a male fruit fly that wanted to mate.
Who knew a fruit fly brain was so complex.
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