"Electronic fruit flies" alarm Musk! Behind it is a whole-brain map of 130,000 neurons, which can be run on a computer

Brain research has taken another big step forward!

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

Contains 130,000 annotated neurons from the female Drosophila melanogaster brain, and the 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 relevant information on the Codex website, and you can have a panoramic view of the connectivity, size, neurotransmitters and other information of each neuron.

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Includes intuitive 3D models.

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This study attracted a lot of attention once it was released.

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NVIDIA AI scientist Fan Linxi（Jim Fan） Just repost and like:

Fascinating What's more, this Princeton University study contains nature's attention, working memory and even basic consciousness algorithms.

Considering the connectome as a compiled executable binary, how much source code can we decompile from a complete brain simulation?

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

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

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Musk also paid attention to this "electronic fruit fly" and felt that things were starting to get strange.

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Drawing through electron microscopy images

The research team reconstructed the complete connectome map of the female Drosophila melanogaster brain.

Different from traditional slicing methods, the information in the atlas is mainly obtained from electron microscope photos.

These electron microscopy photos come from the FAFB (full adult fly brain) data set released by Zheng, Lauritzen et al. in 2018.

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

The Drosophila brain, which is only 0.1 millimeters in size, has hundreds of millions of synapses, which is denser than mammalian synapses.

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

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These nine categories are based on dividing neurons into three parts according to the direction of information flow.

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By comparing it with the neural structure under an optical microscope, the accuracy of the model established by the team was initially verified.

Further, numerical calculations and manual sampling inspection results also prove that the model is accurate.

In addition, through statistical analysis, the team also predicted the neurotransmitter components between neurons with high accuracy.

The research team also analyzed the neural circuits of the Drosophila eye and tracked the process of information flow from input neurons to output neurons.

Although the number of input and output neurons occupies a small proportion in the nervous system, they are the bridge between the brain and the outside world.

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

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The team traversed each seed neuron and measured the process of information being transmitted to the nerve center and then to the outgoing nerve.

The distance traveled by information transfer during the traversal process is sorted and then normalized.

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

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It took 4 years to create

It is worth mentioning that the complete brain data from adult fruit flies( FAFB) It took researchers a total of 194 weeks, or about 4 years, to completely construct the brain map of adult fruit flies.

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

According to the official website information, FlyWire is an artificial intelligence and human collaboration project aimed at reconstructing the whole brain connectome of Drosophila. Specifically, FlyWire was created in the labs of Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung at Princeton University, with a community of neurobiologists, computer scientists, and proofreaders.

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

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Paper address:
[1]https://www.php.cn/link/b8c4c8b2271787e2f78b5fe2ce193caa[2]https://www.php. cn/link/8af141d3c5a5146a3eac9d166ab4c458[3]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.02.539144v1.full.pdf

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