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An international research consortium has released the first complete wiring diagram of an entire fruit fly brain.
Maps that show every neuron in a brain and the myriad connections between them are called connectomes. Fruit flies have 139,255 neurons in their brain, with over 50 million synapses.
That isn't a lot compared to a human brain, which has about 86 million neurons, but fruit flies do complicated things such as walk, fly, navigate, even sing.
"If we want to understand how the brain works, we need a mechanistic understanding of how all the neurons fit together and let you think. For most brains, we have no idea how these networks function," explains Dr. Gregory Jefferis.
The FlyWire Consortium brought together expertise from dozens of labs around the world to achieve this. Dr. Jefferis and other colleagues annotated the different types of neurons found - 4,500 of which were new to science.
The CT1 neuron spans across an entire eye and contains 140,000 synapses.
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