“Murthy hopes to eventually have a male fly connectome, too, which would allow researchers to study male-specific behaviours such as singing.”
Uploaded female fruitfly seeking choral companion to share the long, icy eternity of virtual immortality.
Mark Dominus replied to Greg Egan's status
@gregeganSF I was not expecting this. The revonstruction of the drosophila larva brain (3,016 neurons, 548k synapses) was big news when it happened. But here is the adult brain (139,255 neurons, 54.5m synapses), only 18 months later.
Apparently some people spent their COVID lockdown fixing errors in the first, imperfect draft of the connectome … and also helping to classify 4,581 new types of neuron that were found in the micrographs.
“But these tools aren’t perfect, and the wiring diagram needed to be checked for errors. The scientists spent a great deal of time manually proofreading the data — so much time that they invited volunteers to help. In all, the consortium members and the volunteers made more than 3 million manual edits … ”
Where the fruit flies sing:
“[W]e demonstrate that hearing regulates aggression in Drosophila males. Further, we show that courtship and aggression songs differentially affect aggression, indicating that hearing contributes to the context-dependent regulation of aggression.”
Albert Cardona replied to Greg Egan's status
The connectome of the Drosophila male nerve cord, where the neural circuits for generating the courtship song reside, has already been mapped:
"A Connectome of the Male Drosophila Ventral Nerve Cord", by Takemura et al. 2023
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.05.543757v1
What's missing now is the brain of the male. I'll let the joke write itself.
The connectome of the Drosophila male nerve cord, where the neural circuits for generating the courtship song reside, has already been mapped:
"A Connectome of the Male Drosophila Ventral Nerve Cord", by Takemura et al. 2023
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.05.543757v1
What's missing now is the brain of the male. I'll let the joke write itself.
