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Detailed Structure of the Fruit Fly Brain
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[QUOTE="BillTre, post: 6030500, member: 581757"] A group of scientists have assembled transmission electron microscopic (EM) images from the serially sectioned brain of a female fruit fly ([I]Drosophila melangaster[/I], a model research organism) to make a database of the detailed structure of its brain. Z. Zheng et al., “A complete electron microscopy volume of the brain of adult [I]Drosophila melanogaster[/I],” [URL='https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)30787-6'][I]Cell[/I][/URL], doi:10.1016/j.cell.2018.06.019, 2018. Transmission electron microscopy allows synapses between individual neurons to be identified and for the details of complex processes of neurons to be reconstructed across different sections (3D reconstruction). This little article shows a [URL='https://www.the-scientist.com/image-of-the-day/snapshot-64521']rotating 3D view of some of the neurons in the fly brain[/URL] from this article. This [URL='http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/tour-de-force-researchers-image-entire-fly-brain-minute-detail?utm_campaign=news_daily_2018-07-19&et_rid=33537079&et_cid=2192551']Science news article[/URL] has a fascinating video that zooms in from a single section of the whole fly brain (low power) up to the high mag EM images that clearly show synapses. This might give you a feel for the amount of structural information involved. This is a big step in technical capability. Previously (1986), the nervous system (actually the whole worm) of the [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans'][I]Caenorhabditis elegans[/I][/URL] (a much smaller simpler model research animal than a fruitfly) was serially sectioned and analyzed to identify all of its neurons, their structures and the synapses between them. From this information, the entire contectome (all the connections between all the different neurons in the animal) of [I]C. elegans[/I] was assembled. This is information that would be important for any attempt to explain an organism's behavior with reference to the physical structure of its nervous system. The C. elegans worm is very small and simple. The whole adoult animal has about 1,000 cells. The nervous system of the adult hermaphroditic, for example, has 302 neurons with about 7,000 synapses. The fruit fly brain, in contrast, has about 100,000 (10[SUP]5[/SUP] neurons. All of the connections between the different neurons should be identifiable in this structural database. The brain of a larval 5 day old zebrafish has been described as having about 100,000 neurons, but it continues to grow and add many more neurons as it enlarges greatly during its later development. The human brain has been described as having 100,000,000,000 (100 billion, 10[SUP]11[/SUP]) neurons. [/QUOTE]
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