{"id":31634,"date":"2016-11-02T20:16:58","date_gmt":"2016-11-03T03:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/the-wiring-of-fly-brains-mapping-cell-to-cell-connections"},"modified":"2017-06-04T14:05:40","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T21:05:40","slug":"the-wiring-of-fly-brains-mapping-cell-to-cell-connections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/the-wiring-of-fly-brains-mapping-cell-to-cell-connections","title":{"rendered":"The wiring of fly brains\u2014mapping cell-to-cell connections"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-wiring-of-fly-brains-mapping-cell-to-cell-connections.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Biologists at Caltech have developed a new system for visualizing connections between individual cells in fly brains. The finding may ultimately lead to \u201cwiring diagrams\u201d of fly and other animal brains, which would help researchers understand how neurons are connected.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo understand how the brain works we need to know how neurons are wired to each other,\u201d says Carlos Lois, research professor in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech and principal investigator of the new research, which appears in the November issue of the journal <i>Development<\/i>. \u201cThis is similar to understanding how a computer works by looking at how transistors are connected.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Animals are made up of different types of specialized cells. In order for an animal to function, the cells have to be able to communicate with each other. For example, neurons directly communicate with <a href=\"http:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/muscle+cells\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">muscle cells<\/a> so that an animal can move. In diseases such as cancer, this communication process can go awry: when tumors metastasize, they no longer \u201clisten\u201d to neighboring cells that tell them not to grow. Instead, the <a href=\"http:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/cancer+cells\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">cancer cells<\/a> grow uncontrollably and migrate to other parts of the body.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/news\/2016-11-wiring-brainsmapping-cell-to-cell.html\">http:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/news\/2016&#45;11-wiring-brainsmapping-cell-to-cell.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Biologists at Caltech have developed a new system for visualizing connections between individual cells in fly brains. The finding may ultimately lead to \u201cwiring diagrams\u201d of fly and other animal brains, which would help researchers understand how neurons are connected. \u201cTo understand how the brain works we need to know how neurons are wired to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1523,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-computing","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31634","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\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31634"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65858,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31634\/revisions\/65858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}