Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Another big step forward in brain science research!

Scientists from Princeton have announced that they have successfully created the first map of the whole brain connectome of adult animals.

It contains 130000 annotated neurons from the brain of the female Drosophila melanogaster and tens of millions of chemical synapses between them.

More importantly, the data is completely open and can be queried with one click.

You only need to enter the relevant information on the Codex website, and you can get a panoramic view of the connectivity, size, neurotransmitters and other information of each neuron.

Including intuitive 3D models.

As soon as the study was published, it attracted a lot of attention.

Fan Linxi (Jim Fan), an AI scientist at Nvidia, retweeted likes:

What is fascinating is that the Princeton study contains nature's attention, working memory and even basic consciousness algorithms.

How much source code can we decompile from a complete brain simulation if the neural connectors are treated as compiled executable binaries?

Not only that, the brain structure of fruit flies also has important implications for machine learning.

Someone has run the model on the computer to simulate the process of fruit flies eating and combing their antennae.

Musk also noticed the "electronic fruit fly" and felt that things were starting to get weird.

The complete connectome map of the brain of female Drosophila melanogaster was reconstructed by electron microscope image drawing.

Different from the traditional slicing method, the information in the map is mainly obtained from the electron microscope photos.

These electron microscope photos are from the FAFB (full adult fly brain) data set released by Zheng and Lauritzen et al in 2018.

The resolution of the electron microscope photos can clearly see the protein molecules, and the relevant information can be obtained by computer analysis.

The brain of a fruit fly, which is only 0.1 mm in size, has hundreds of millions of synapses, which is denser than that of mammals.

The nerves in the brain of Drosophila melanogaster are divided into 9 major categories and 31 small categories, and 78 regions are divided.

These nine categories continue to be divided into three parts according to the flow of information.

By comparing with the neural structure under the optical microscope, the accuracy of the model established by the team has been preliminarily verified.

Furthermore, the results of numerical calculation and manual sampling inspection also prove that the model is accurate.

In addition, through statistical analysis, the team also predicted the composition of neurotransmitters between neurons with high accuracy.

The team also analyzed the neural circuits in the fruit fly's eyes and tracked the flow of information from input neurons to output neurons.

Although the number of input and output neurons accounts for a small proportion in the nervous system, they serve as bridges between the brain and the outside world.

In this process, the team used a probability model to analyze the flow of information starting from the seed neurons.

The team traversed each seed neuron and measured the transmission of information to the nerve center and then to the efferent nerve.

In the process of traversal, the distance of information transmission is sorted and then normalized.

This process helped researchers determine how different types of incoming information were transmitted to the corresponding nerve centers, and the results were consistent with expectations.

It is worth mentioning that it took researchers a total of 194 weeks, or about four years, from the complete brain data (FAFB) of adult fruit flies to the complete brain map of adult fruit flies.

Behind this, the project, called FlyWire, has been supported by more than 200 community members.

According to the official website, FlyWire is a human-AI collaborative project aimed at rebuilding the whole brain connectome of fruit flies. Specifically, FlyWire was founded by the Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung labs at Princeton University, and the community is made up of neurobiologists, computer scientists and proofreaders.

By linking neuronal connections to brain function, we can make significant progress in understanding how the brain works.

Paper address:

[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.27.546656v1.full.pdf

[2] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.27.546055v1.full.pdf

[3] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.02.539144v1.full.pdf

This article is from the official account of Wechat: quantum bit (ID:QbitAI), author: fish and Sheep Creasy

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