Fly brain neural map.
Did you know that mapping a speck of the human brain (smaller than a grain of rice) revealed never-before-seen structures, like single neurons connected by up to 50 synapses? This offers us brand-new clues into how the brain processes information, forms memories, and what happens when those networks fail.
Mapping these intricate networks is a field called connectomics and it’s critical to helping scientists understand how the brain works.
@GoogleResearch is developing advanced technology and AI tools to accelerate connectomics research. Here’s a quick history of connectomics and how it’s evolved over the past 40 years:
— The Roundworm: In 1986, researchers completed the first connectome for the C. elegans roundworm (302 neurons). It took 16 years of using markers to manually trace paths on enlarged photographs!
— The Fruit Fly: In 2020, our team mapped roughly half a fruit fly brain (25,000 neurons). That connectome database and its visualization reframed the way neural circuits are studied and understood in the fly brain.
— The First Human Sample: In 2021, the H01 dataset was released, showing a 1.4-petabyte 3D rendering of one cubic millimeter of human brain tissue. This marked the first-ever human connectome map and offered new insights into the human cortex.
— Mapping the Mouse Brain: In 2023, an NIH-supported project to map 2–3% of the mouse brain was launched, focusing on the memory- and navigation-encoding hippocampal region as a key step toward mapping a whole mouse brain.
— Complete Fruit Fly and Fish: Coming soon, complete connectomes of the male fruit fly (166,000 neurons) as well as the larval zebrafish. The larval zebrafish will mark the first full brain map for a vertebrate!
Learn what Google Research has already revealed about the brain.
Explore more of our research here: https://sites.research.google/gr/neural-mapping/
