To build a picture of the fruit fly larva connectome, Zlatic, Cardona and colleagues scanned thousands of slices of the larva’s brain using a high-resolution electron microscope. In the same way that genes are conserved across the animal kingdom, I think that the basic circuit motifs that implement these fundamental behaviours will also be conserved. However, she said:Īll brains are similar – they are all networks of interconnected neurons – and all brains of all species have to perform many complex behaviours: they all need to process sensory information, learn, select actions, navigate their environments, choose food, recognise their conspecifics, escape from predators etc. Zlatic explained that current technology isn’t yet advanced enough to map the connectome for higher animals such as large mammals.
But now, we can start gaining a mechanistic understanding of how the brain works. Without knowing the structure of a brain, we’re guessing on the way computations are implemented. This means neuroscience has been mostly operating without circuit maps. elegans, the tadpole of a low chordate, and the larva of a marine annelid, all of which have several hundred neurons. But, up until this point, we’ve not seen the structure of any brain except of the roundworm C. The way the brain circuit is structured influences the computations the brain can do.
Information in the form of chemicals passes from one neuron to another through these contact points. The study is published in ‘Science’ on 10 March 2023.Īn organism’s nervous system, including the brain, is made up of neurons that are connected to each other via synapses.
Professor Marta Zlatic and Professor Albert Cardona of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the University of Cambridge and colleagues from both the UK and the US led this ground-breaking research. It’s the largest complete brain connectome described yet. The map of the 3016 neurons that make up the larva’s brain and the detailed circuitry of neural pathways within it is known as a ‘connectome’. This huge step forward in science will ultimately help us understand the basic principles by which signals travel through the brain at the neural level and lead to behaviour and learning.
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