Multi-Worm Tracker software tracked time-varying contours of larvae.COURTESY OF J.T. VOGELSTEIN ET AL.Neuroscientists have a new guide to consult as they work to understand the functions of the fruit fly’s neural architecture. Researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Virginia and Johns Hopkins University in Maryland have recorded and classified the behavioral effects of activating sets of neurons throughout the Drosophila larval brain. Together, the activated cells comprise the majority of the larval brain’s 10,000 neurons, the researchers found. Their work was published today (March 27) in Science.
“They’ve come up with a framework to more or less completely describe what it’s doing when you’re acutely stimulating neurons,” said William Schafer, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge who did not participate in the research. “I think it’s really nice.”
This work “gives me some hope that we can actually understand the Drosophila brain,” said Aravinthan Samuel, a neuroscientist and physicist at Harvard University, who also was not involved in the study.
The Janelia Farm-led team took advantage of several tools developed in recent years, including optogenetics. With access to more than 1,000 Drosophila lines with the GAL4 gene inserted into clusters of two to 15 neurons, the team took flies that had been engineered to selectively express the light-sensitive protein channelrhodopsin in ...
