By digitally mapping the whole brain of a fruit fly, scientists hope to gain insight into human brain disorders.
As a large team of scientists recently completed the assembly of a complete wiring diagram of the adult fruit fly brain, Phil Shiu decided to simulate that massive circuit — 139,255 neurons and 50 million connections — in a computer.
That simulation, which can run on a laptop, proved amazingly good at predicting how the real fly brain responds to stimuli. In a paper published today (Wednesday, Oct. 2) in the journal Nature — the same issue in which the fly brain’s wiring diagram, or connectome, is announced — Shiu, a former postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues report that the computer model accurately predicts the neurons that will be activated in a fly’s brain when taste and touch sensors are stimulated.
“It’s been unclear how much the connectome would actually allow us to predict neural activity,” said Shiu, who now works at a startup, Eon, that works on artificial intelligence approaches to modeling connectomes. “Now, we and others have found that the connectome really does critically allow us to predict and understand how the brain works.”
Shiu said that he fully expects to be able to model more complex brains as their connectomes are assembled. The next goal is a connectome of the mouse brain; the ultimate prize, the wiring matrix of a human brain.
“This really suggests that getting a mouse connectome, and eventually a human connectome, will be incredibly valuable. We can imagine a world where we can simulate a mouse brain, or eventually a human brain, and really get fundamental insights into the causes of various mental health disorders and about how the brain works,” Shiu said.