In the 1970s, scientists from several countries proposed to reconstruct, one by one, all the neurons in the brain as they appear under an electron microscope. They started with a small worm. Caenorhabditis elegans has only 302 neurons. It took 16 years. How much time would be required to repeat this arduous task for the 100 billion neurons in the human brain?

In the 1970s, scientists from several countries proposed to reconstruct, one by one, all the neurons in the brain as they appear under an electron microscope. They started with a small worm. Caenorhabditis elegans has only 302 neurons. It took 16 years. How much time would be required to repeat this arduous task for the 100 billion neurons in the human brain?

In the 1970s, scientists from several countries proposed to reconstruct, one by one, all the neurons in the brain as they appear under an electron microscope. They started with a small worm. Caenorhabditis elegans has only 302 neurons. It took 16 years. How much time would be required to repeat this arduous task for the 100 billion neurons in the human brain?

A collaboration led by the Flywire Consortium and comprising hundreds of scientists has completed a whole map of the adult fruit fly brain after several decades of collaborative work.

A collaboration led by the Flywire Consortium and comprising hundreds of scientists has completed a whole map of the adult fruit fly brain after several decades of collaborative work. By using electron microscopy and three-dimensional reconstruction supported by AI tools, the researchers have revealed the neural wiring of the Drosophila melanogaster brain, a connectome of 140,000 neurons with 50 million synaptic connections. In the future, researchers could possibly use this map as an artificial in silico model to study the brain as a simulator through its connections, though a lot of work remains to be done for this.