REVEALED: New technology to map brain wiring!

Scientists have created a new technique to map the network of connections within the brain, an advance that help scientists understand how the organ works. The human brain is composed of billions of neurons wired together in intricate webs and communicating through electrical pulses and chemical signals. Although neuroscientists have made progress in understanding the brain’s many functions – such as regulating sleep, storing memories, and making decisions – visualising the entire “wiring diagram” of neural connections throughout a brain is not possible using currently available methods.

Using Drosophila fruit flies, researchers at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the US have developed a method to easily see neural connections and the flow of communications in real time within living flies. The research, published in the journal eLife, is a step forward toward creating a map of the entire fly brain’s many connections, which could help scientists understand the neural circuits within human brains as well.

“If an electrical engineer wants to understand how a computer works, the first thing that he or she would want to figure out is how the different components are wired to each other,” said Carlos Lois, research professor at Caltech. “Similarly, we must know how neurons …read more