{"id":148368,"date":"2022-10-17T17:23:35","date_gmt":"2022-10-17T22:23:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/in-a-tour-de-force-researchers-image-an-entire-fly-brain-in-minute-detail"},"modified":"2022-10-17T17:23:35","modified_gmt":"2022-10-17T22:23:35","slug":"in-a-tour-de-force-researchers-image-an-entire-fly-brain-in-minute-detail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/in-a-tour-de-force-researchers-image-an-entire-fly-brain-in-minute-detail","title":{"rendered":"In a \u2018tour de force,\u2019 researchers image an entire fly brain in minute detail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kaTC9JQUDAw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Circa 2018 <span class=\"wp-smiley emoji emoji-face_with_colon_three\" title=\":3\">face_with_colon_three<\/span> <\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>\u201cThis data set\u2014and the opportunities it creates\u2014are \u2026 arguably one of the most important things to have happened in neurobiology recently,\u201d says Rachel Wilson, a neurobiologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the new work. \u201cAnyone in the world who is interested can download the data set and determine whether any two neurons \u2026 talk to each other.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The 100,000-neuron fruit fly brain is elementary compared with the roughly 100 billion neurons in our own skulls. But the fly is still \u201cmuch more than this little speck that you swat away from your wine glass over dinner,\u201d says Davi Bock, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. Some systems in the fly brain\u2014like those responsible for detecting and remembering smells\u2014likely share \u201ccommon principles\u201d with those in humans, he says.<\/p>\n<p>To make out features of individual synapses, where a signal from one neuron travels to another, Bock and colleagues used an electron microscope, which can resolve much finer detail than a traditional light microscope. They soaked a fly\u2019s brain in a solution containing heavy metals, which bind to the membranes of neurons and to proteins at the synapses. That made the brain look like a wad of noodles, each dark on the outside but white on the inside, Bock explains. Then, a diamond knife cut the brain into about 7,000 slices, each of which was struck with a beam of electrons from the microscope to create an image.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Circa 2018 face_with_colon_three \u201cThis data set\u2014and the opportunities it creates\u2014are \u2026 arguably one of the most important things to have happened in neurobiology recently,\u201d says Rachel Wilson, a neurobiologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the new work. \u201cAnyone in the world who is interested can download the data set and determine whether [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}