Three New Studies Push the Field of Connectomics

 Connectomics  

For the field of connectomics, the micro-scale the brain is a mess; a thick tangle of nerve cells connected at synapses. Mapping just a tiny portion of this mess, a few hundred cells, is a huge challenge. But seeing exactly how brain cells are wired together is giving researchers new insights into brain function.

Researchers working out the brain connectomics of fruitflies and mouse retinas have mapped the forest of interconnections and neuronal activity of the animals' visual networks.

The scientists, whose work is published in three separate studies in Nature, have also created three-dimensional reconstructions, shown in the video above.

Image Source: Kevin Briggman

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All three studies interrogate parts of the central nervous system located in the eyes. In one, Moritz Helmstaedter, a neurobiologist at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany, and his collaborators created a complete 3D map of a 950-cell section of a mouse retina, including the interconnections among those neuronal cells. To do so, the team tapped into the help of more than 200 students, who collectively spent more than 20,000 hours processing the images.

The two other studies investigated how the retinas of the fruitfly (Drosophila melanogaster) detect motion. Shin-ya Takemura, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia, and his collaborators mapped four neuronal circuits associated with motion perception and found that each is wired for detecting motion in a particular direction — up, down, left or right.

In the third study, Matthew Maisak, a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, and his colleagues mapped the same four cellular networks and tagged the cells of each with protein markers that fluoresce in red, green, blue or yellow in response to stimulation with light3.

Although the three studies looked at tiny bits of neuronal networks in animal retinas, researchers hope that by improving the techniques they will be able some day to map the full sets of connections, or connectomes, of entire brains — including human ones.

The video above mentions that mapping the mouse retina connectome is being crowd-sourced in an effort to help identify connections that the artificial intelligence systems being used cannot sort out.  To take part in this research, visit the EyeWire website.

Such technology, according to scientists like Ken Hayworth, may one day even allow us to recreate our neural maps digitally and upload our brains.



SOURCE  Nature

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