Brain dictionary and road map created
16 Apr 2014 by Evoluted New Media
An international team of neuroscientists has not only tripled the number of identified insect brain structures but created a simple dictionary to talk about them.
The team – which included researchers from America, Japan, Germany and the UK – have produced a comprehensive atlas of neuroanatomical centres and computational centres of the insect brain and in the process identified many previously unknown structures.
“This effort provided a three-dimensional road map for describing structures for all insect brains and enables comparisons with other arthropods,” said Nick Strausfeld, from the University of Arizona. “It has a huge value in describing network relationships between computational centres in the brain.”
The work – appearing in Neuron – will provide the research community with a unified system of terminology and has set the stage for a systematic effort to elucidate brain structures and functions that carry over to functions of the human brain.
Researchers in Tokyo used confocal fluorescence microscopy to create virtual slices of the fruit fly brain to reveal its architecture down to single cells. Their pinhead-sized brain has more than 50 anatomically distinct centres approaching a complexity until now only recognised in fish or mice.
“We now have a very detailed understanding of the distribution of neurons in discrete centres and the connections among them,” Strausfeld said.
“The complexity of insect behaviour is increasingly recognised by the genetics community to allow us to model various human diseases,” said Linda Restifo, also from the University of Arizona. “These tiny, but now well-defined, regions we see in the insect brain probably have particular neurons with particular connections driving certain behaviours that are becoming ever more important in studying behaviour like aggression or addiction.”
Restifo believes these insects may become more useful than rodent models for modelling behaviour that fails to match physiological effects seen in human forms of the disease.
The online version of the paper includes an 80-page data supplement that will become publically available in six months; including hundreds of videos and 3D video animations which will allow neuroscientists to work more efficiently compare their results and obtain more meaningful interpretations.
