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Largest brain map ever reveals fruit fly’s neurons in exquisite detail (www.nature.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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"... Researchers are hoping to do that now that they have a new map — the most complete for any organism so far — of the brain of a single fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). The wiring diagram, or ‘connectome’, includes nearly 140,000 neurons and captures more than 54.5 million synapses, which are the connections between nerve cells.

... The map is described in a package of nine papers about the data published in Nature today. Its creators are part of a consortium known as FlyWire, co-led by neuroscientists Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung at Princeton University in New Jersey."

See the associated Nature collection: The FlyWire connectome: neuronal wiring diagram of a complete fly brain, which also has links to the nine papers

All nine papers are open access!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (7 children)

So can we model this now?

Can we use this data to essentially emulate a fruit fly's behavioral patterns?

Like can we just wire this up in a software neural network, feed it some inputs, and see what happens?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Based on my understanding of how these things work: Yes, probably no, and probably no... I think the map is just a "catalogue" of what things are, not at the point where we can do fancy models on it

This is their GitHub account, anyone knowledgeable enough about research software engineering is welcomed to give it a try

There are a few neuroscientists who are trying to decipher biological neural connections using principles from deep learning (a.k.a. AI/ML), don't think this is a popular subfield though. Andreas Tolias is the first one that comes to my mind, he and a bunch of folks from Columbia/Baylor were in a consortium when I started my PhD... not sure if that consortium is still going. His lab website (SSL cert expired bruh). They might solve the second two statements you raised... no idea when though.

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