The news: Researchers from Google and Janelia Research Campus in Virginia have unveiled the biggest high-resolution map of brain connectivity yet, known as a connectome. It shows a diagram of a fruit fly’s brain, containing 25,000 neurons and the 20 million connections between them. More images can be viewed here.
What does it show? The map shows a region of the fly’s brain that is about 250 micrometers across, equivalent to the thickness of two strands of hair. The mapped area accounts for about a third of the fly’s total brain, and it contains regions associated with memory and navigation. A pre-print paper describing the research is available on bioRxiv, and the team has made the data available for anyone to view and download.
How it was made: Once the fruit fly brain had been sliced into very thin sections, the slices were scanned using an electron microscope. That produced 50 trillion 3D pixels, which were processed using an algorithm to trace each cell’s pathways. Despite Google’s computing muscle, the project still required a lot of manual labor to proofread the data.
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