#brain map

A picture of good health.

Total Connection

The wiring diagram of a whole adult female fruit fly brain. This map or connectome represents the 50 million chemical synapses or connections between 139,255 neurons and is helping advance understanding of the brain functioning as a whole

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Sven Dorkenwald and colleagues

Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature, October 2024

These images offer an example of how MAPseq can determine the wiring of multitudes of neurons. The small colored dots in the first image represent the positions of the cell bodies of 50,000 neurons in the cortex of a mouse. In the second image, the axon projections from just two of those neurons to endpoints elsewhere in the brain are shown. In the third image, the pathways from many more of the neurons are superimposed. Courtesy of Tony Zador

Flying Start

Scientists have completed a map of connections – a connectome – between neurons in the brain of a developing fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). Fruit flies share many of our genes – so the circuits unpicked here are likely to simpler but similar to our own, with many secrets to share. A team of researchers spent 12 years piecing together electron microscopy pictures, tracing 548,000 connections between 3,016 neurons – each represented by a colourful balloon here (although around 100,000 times smaller). While the team begins work on mapping out the more complex adult fly brain, they are already learning from the combination of 'big picture' and 'zoomed in' views this map provides. The organisation of the fly’s brain circuits may inspire new forms of machine learning and artificial intelligence, while providing a plateau from which to appreciate – and make plans to explore – the vast complexity of the mammalian brain.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Michael Winding and colleagues

Johns Hopkins University, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Baltimore, MD, USA and MRC LMB, Cambridge, UK

Image copyright held by the original authors

Research published in Science, March 2023

Head Scratching

“Get those synapses firing”, “test your grey matter” – the idioms may be tired, but understanding what’s going on inside our noggins is full of fresh challenges. While scientists often use MRI to trace out brain structures, and microscopy to zoom in on its cells – here they bring everything together. Shaving thin slices off a human brain, they use microscopy to highlight blood vessels in each slice (in red). Next, through careful comparison with MRI scans, they pull the images back together like a sliced loaf in a bag, reassembling the brain as a virtual 3D model. The result is a ‘mesoscopic’ view – highly-detailed but also zoomed out far enough to take in the entire vasculature. The team presents this model, and others looking at different brain tissues, as public resource – helping scientists old and new appreciate the brain from fresh perspectives, towards solving future mysteries in neurodegenerative disease.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Anneke Alkemade and Pierre-Louis Bazin, and colleagues

Integrative Model-Based Neuroscience Research Unit, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Science Advances, April 2022