A study claims that the mapping of your organ is similar to artificial neural networks.
They are common in the warmer months and somewhat heavy when it comes to eating or resting quietly in the open air. Flies have so many subspecies that each of them have different characteristics. For example, the tsetse fly It is one of the animals that causes the most deaths to humans and the fruit flyprotagonist of this article, is one of those animals that has traveled into space.
Regarding the latter, a group of scientists Has got shape and image your brain, in a publication shown in the magazine Science and titled as ‘The connectome of the brain of an insect’. By the way, that ‘connectome’ thing identifies the map of connections between neurons of the brain.
Mapping the brain of a fruit fly
The scientific community already knows what it is decipher the connectome of an insect since the year 1986date on which it was possible to map the brain of a nematode. in that first investigationrudimentary as you can see, the neural connections were drawn by hand with colored pencils. A total of 302 neurons and 7,600 synapses were described. now almost 40 years laterscience has succeeded in creating a map a lot largerwith 3,016 neurons and 548,000 synapses.
Researchers at @JohnsHopkins have completed the most advanced brain map to date: that of a fruit fly.
“It’s been 50 years and this is the first brain connectome,” said engineer Joshua T. Vogelstein, “It’s a flag in the sand that we can do this.” https://t.co/jOmGbvJfxI pic.twitter.com/91YXBW1DQA
—Johns Hopkins University (@JohnsHopkins) March 10, 2023
This has been possible thanks to the collaboration between the University of Cambridgewho has spent the last 12 years evaluating the brain of a 6-hour-old fruit fly through an electron microscope, and John Hopkins University. This last entity has been responsible for a group of computer scientists develop a program to determine the types of cells and synapses detected and the patterns in neuronal connections.
The surprises It didn’t take long for them to come to light. First, it was found that the hemispheres of these flies are more connected than previously thought, since zigzag connections could be seen between them. In addition, it was possible to verify how some synapse were repetitive, which is a symptom of reinforcement in areas of the brain specialized in learning. That is why this map has certain similarities with the architecture of some AI models. Martha Zlatica researcher at the University of Cambridge, ensures that:
This brain does a lot of multi-sensory integration, which is a very powerful thing computationally speaking.