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posted by mrpg on Sunday October 06, @08:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the next:bumblebees dept.

Scientists map fruit fly brain in neurobiological milestone:

Scientists announced on Thursday a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that may provide insight into brains across the animal kingdom, including people.

The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons - brain nerve cells - in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It also could pave the way for mapping the brains of other species.

"You might be asking why we should care about the brain of a fruit fly. My simple answer is that if we can truly understand how any brain functions, it's bound to tell us something about all brains," said Princeton University professor of neuroscience and computer science Sebastian Seung, one of the co-leaders of the work published in a series of studies in the journal Nature

[...] "And flies are an important model system for neurosciences. Their brains solve many of the same problems we do... They're capable of sophisticated behaviors like the execution of walking and flying, learning and memory behaviors, navigation, feeding and even social interactions, which is a behavior that we studied in my lab at Princeton," Murthy added.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 07, @07:52AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 07, @07:52AM (#1376071)

    Boeing Navigational Systems.

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