Researchers have mapped each of the roughly 100,000 neurons in the poppy seed–size brain of an adult female fruit fly, according to a study published in Cell yesterday (July 19).
“The entire fly brain has never been imaged before at this resolution that lets you see connections between neurons,” coauthor Davi Bock, who studies neuronal circuits at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus, says in a statement.
Bock’s group sped up an imaging technique called serial section transmission electron microscopy to take 21 million images of thousands of different sections of the fruit fly brain. By putting together the images, the team has created an open-source database to give other laboratories the opportunity to peek into the fruit fly’s brain.
Z. Zheng et al., “A complete electron microscopy volume of the brain of adult Drosophila melanogaster,” Cell, doi:10.1016/j.cell.2018.06.019, 2018.
