Adult fruit fly brain (IMAGE)
Caption
For many heartbreaking diseases of the brain — dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and others — doctors can only treat the symptoms. Medical science does not have a cure.
Why? Because it’s confounding to cure what we don’t understand, and the human brain, with its millions of neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses, is almost hopelessly complex.
A Princeton-led team of neuroscientists has now made a massive step toward understanding the human brain, by building a neuron-by-neuron and synapse-by-synapse roadmap — scientifically speaking, a “connectome” — through the brain of an adult fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster).
This image is a video still showing the brain inside an adult fruit fly. The full video is available by request to flywire@princeton.edu.
Credit
Amy Sterling / FlyWire / Princeton University
Usage Restrictions
Editorial use only
License
Original content