Researchers from Google and Janelia Research Campus made a complex map of the brain of a fruit fly. Tiny brain, big science: Researchers from Google and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus have created an in-depth 3D map of a fruit fly's brain, which they say could teach us more about how the organ controls learning, memory and other behaviors. It's the largest brain map of this type -- called a connectome -- ever created, for any animal, according to the research project website and a paper describing the work. The map covers a large portion of the fly's brain, including the circuits used for learning, navigation, visual processing and possibly sleep, says the paper. It includes about 25,000 neurons, along with 20 million chemical synapses found between them, and it required complex imaging technology and deep learning algorithms, according to an article from the research campus.

It may seem absurd to compare a tiny fruit fly's brain to that of a majestic elephant. Yet it is the dream of many neuroscientists to find deep rules that very different brains share. As Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, who has studied a variety of animals, from locusts to turtles, has said, "Neural responses can be described by the same mathematical operation … in completely different systems." Vivek Jayaraman, a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, and a former student of Laurent's, believes that neuroscientists are on the verge of identifying some of these deep neural rules. Grasping them would advance another neuroscientific dream: to be able to predict animal behavior as easily as Newton could predict the behavior of a moving object. Jayaraman and a small number of researchers studying the brain's GPS have, in fact, already experienced the thrill of discovering one such rule.

The connectivity between brain cells plays a significant role in the function of the brain. In general, brain regions and their interactions can be modeled as complex brain network, which describes highly efficient information transmission in a brain. To study brain networks in detail, neuroscientists use various neuroimaging techniques. Last year, in collaboration with Janelia Research Campus and Cambridge University, Google published a study that represents the automated reconstruction of an entire fruit fly brain. The study mainly focused on the individual shape of the cells.

It may seem absurd to compare a tiny fruit fly's brain to that of a majestic elephant. Yet it is the dream of many neuroscientists to find deep rules that very different brains share. As Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, who has studied a variety of animals, from locusts to turtles, has said, "Neural responses can be described by the same mathematical operation…in completely different systems." Vivek Jayaraman, a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, and a student of Laurent's, believes that neuroscientists are on the verge of identifying some of these deep neural rules. Grasping them would advance another neuroscientific dream: to be able to predict animal behavior as easily as Newton could predict the behavior of a moving object.

Ask any neuroscientist to draw you a neuron, and it'll probably look something like a star with two tails: one stubby with extensive tree-like branches, the other willowy, lengthy and dotted with spindly spikes. While a decent abstraction, this cartoonish image hides the uncomfortable truth that scientists still don't know much about what many neurons actually look like, not to mention the extent of their connections. But without untangling the jumbled mess of neural wires that zigzag across the brain, scientists are stumped in trying to answer one of the most fundamental mysteries of the brain: how individual neuronal threads carry and assemble information, which forms the basis of our thoughts, memories, consciousness, and self. What if there was a way to virtually trace and explore the brain's serpentine fibers, much like the way Google Maps allows us to navigate the concrete tangles of our cities' highways? Meet MouseLight, the most extensive map of the mouse brain ever attempted.