dufus Posted January 25, 2020 Share Posted January 25, 2020 Photo credit: Screenshot/Google/FlyEM Google and Janeila, a research campus at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Loudoun County, Virginia, have created "the most complete map of the fly brain ever created." Their research was published earlier this week in the biology pre-print journal bioRxiv. Connectomes, the maps illustrating connections in the brain, have been criticized by some scientists in the past because so far, they haven't led to any major breakthroughs. Drosophila melanogaster, otherwise known as the fruit fly, has a pretty impressive dome for being so small—as in, its brain contains over 100,000 neurons, or brain cells. For the first time, we can see about 25,000 of those neurons, across 4,000 different kinds, and their millions and millions of connections in the brain. Google and Janeila Research Campus, part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Loudoun County, Virginia, have created what they claim to be the world's largest and most detailed map of a brain. Called a wiring diagram, or a connectome, the map looks a bit like a 3D pile of Silly String, using neon colors to represent various portions of the brain that scientists are interested in studying. The researchers can even pull apart the map and isolate brain regions dealing with a fly's sense of smell, vision, or ability to navigate, drilling down into the brain connections they'd like to see. "This was a big bet on something people thought was almost impossible to do," Viren Jain, a research scientist at Google and former laboratory head at Janelia, said in a press statement. "This will be the first time that we can really have a nuanced look at the organization of a nervous system with 100,000 neurons on a synaptic scale." The researchers nicknamed the lucky insect in question, a female fruit fly, "hemibrain." Without high-powered microscopes, data analysis and advances in imaging tech, and deep learning algorithms, this project could have taken two decades, according to Gerry Rubin, vice president of Howard Hughes Medical Institute and executive director of Janeli. Now the map can be used to study fly behavior by analyzing certain portions of the brain under certain conditions. The only question is whether or not critics who say connectomes aren't really useful will ever come around. In the past, these maps have faced pushback because they take so long to put together and haven't yet yielded any major breakthroughs. sauce Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
funkyy Posted January 25, 2020 Share Posted January 25, 2020 "Now the map can be used to study fly behavior" For goodness sake, it's an insect that lands on sh*t and eats it. It lays it's eggs in carcases and in general is a darn nuisance if you're having an open air meal. There, that didn't take long..what's left to study???? The money for this could be better spent on medical research. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mp68terr Posted January 25, 2020 Share Posted January 25, 2020 6 hours ago, funkyy said: For goodness sake, it's an insect that lands on sh*t and eats it... D. melanogaster is not the common fly you are thinking about, landing on and eating sh*t. This fly is widely used for biological research in genetics, physiology, microbial pathogenesis, and life history evolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_melanogaster) 😉 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
funkyy Posted January 25, 2020 Share Posted January 25, 2020 5 hours ago, mp68terr said: D. melanogaster is not the common fly you are thinking about, landing on and eating sh*t. This fly is widely used for biological research in genetics, physiology, microbial pathogenesis, and life history evolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_melanogaster) 😉 Yes...but this research "....hasn't yet yielded any major breakthroughs"....in other words, money wasted!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mp68terr Posted January 25, 2020 Share Posted January 25, 2020 47 minutes ago, funkyy said: Yes...but this research "....hasn't yet yielded any major breakthroughs"....in other words, money wasted!! Connectomes... 3D maps... Fancy way to show what has been described/discovered earlier... Good way to spend tax money (https://neuroscienceblueprint.nih.gov/human-connectome/connectome-programs) to map neural connections and try to understand their development (https://lichtmanlab.fas.harvard.edu/). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Karlston Posted January 25, 2020 Share Posted January 25, 2020 1 hour ago, funkyy said: Yes...but this research "....hasn't yet yielded any major breakthroughs"....in other words, money wasted!! Not necessarily, this research can now be used for more which may yield a breakthrough. Research generally adds only a little to our knowledge, small steps. Breakthroughs aren't nearly as common as we think or would like, nor are they the only aim of research. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mp68terr Posted January 26, 2020 Share Posted January 26, 2020 20 hours ago, Karlston said: Not necessarily, this research can now be used for more which may yield a breakthrough. Wondering if tracing such 3D map can be called research, it's more like a visualization tool summarizing/putting together what has been discovered within the whole community (after hours and hours and hours of embedding, sectioning, reconstructing neurones/neuronal structures). Such map has crucial issues: it does not take into account plastic events and development. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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