A database of electron microscopy images reveals the connections of the entire female fruit fly brain. In this image, types of Kenyon cells (KC) in the mushroom body main calyx are labeled by color: αβc-KCs are green, αβs-KCs are yellowish brown, and gamma-KCs are blue. The white arrows point to visible presynaptic release sites.ZHENG ET AL. 2017A 21-million-image dataset of the female fruit fly brain is offering an unprecedented view of the cells and their connections that underlie the animal’s behavior. The full-brain survey, taken by electron microscopy, allowed researchers to describe all of the neural inputs into a region of the fly’s brain linked to learning, examine how tightly neurons are clustered in the area, and identify a new cell type.
“This is the biggest whole brain imaged at high resolution,” Davi Bock of the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, VA, tells The Scientist. He and his colleagues published a preprint of their results on bioRxiv this month (May 22).
Past studies have produced electron microscopy images with resolution high enough to reveal the wiring of the entire brain of smaller organisms, such as a nematode or a fruit fly larva, or sections from larger animals, including parts of the fly brain or a cat’s thalamus. Imaging the complete fruit fly brain “is nearly two orders of magnitude larger than the next-largest complete brain imaged at sufficient resolution to trace synaptic connectivity,” Bock and colleagues wrote in their report.
The fruit fly brain has a three-dimensional ...
