Ahmed El-Deeb
The knowledge of the synthesis of brains, the mechanisms of their work and their precise anatomy are still very far from being attained, and for this reason we see in this area in particular unprecedented cooperation initiatives from large research institutions.
The most recent example of this is the concerted efforts of Google and the Janelia Center for Scientific Research in Virginia, to produce the largest high-definition 3D map yet known to the brain of a living organism, tracing the full paths of twenty million neuronal connections that reach between 25 thousand neurons in the Drosophila brain!
This brain map - which is called the term "connectome" - is the pinnacle of the connectomics field, which uses highly sophisticated and sophisticated imaging techniques to produce detailed stereoscopic maps of the brains with their nerve cells and the interlinkages between them, although they do not actually cover more than a third of the brain of a fly the fruit.
The only type that researchers succeeded in producing a map of his entire brain is the C. elegans worm from the roundworm division.
How was the study done?
The first step in the production journey of this map was to cut the tiny fly's brain into very fine slices, only 20 مكm thick per slide (human hair might reach 180 تراm).
As for the choice of Drosophila, it is due to its advanced brain capabilities (such as doing spinning dances) compared to having simple and relatively small brains.
Then comes the stage of bombing these tiny slides with a barrage of electrons using a scanning electron microscope, then collecting the huge amount of data produced in the range of 50 trillion voxels (three-dimensional stereoscopic pixels), to undergo special algorithms processing that traces the path and tangles of each neuron.
Despite the great accuracy with which Google's algorithms worked, it took massive human efforts to monitor and review what these algorithms drew, as researchers at the Janelia Center for Scientific Research say that the human review process took them about two years and hundreds of thousands of hours of work, to ensure the correctness of drawing paths Twenty million synapses, using virtual reality devices and 3D drawing software.
What's Next?
While many scientists hold great hopes on the likes of these maps to understand the highly complex relationships between parts of the brain and its functions, others wonder whether all of these mighty endeavors will ultimately produce what justifies and justifies directing scientific spending to them at the expense of other areas of research in science Nervousness.
And in an open invitation to take advantage of this map and the technologies used in it, and to attract more researchers' contributions, Google and Janelia announced the launch of the final map on the Internet, with all its data and codes as open source material.
But even with all of these amazing human efforts combined with the latest available artificial intelligence technologies, it was not possible to produce a map of the entire Drosophila brain that contains almost 100,000 neurons, as the map contained only 25,000 cells.
Compared to the human brain, which contains about 86 billion neurons, we can predict what it would take to produce a map similar to human brains, if we could one day. Even if no one disagrees about the feasibility of achieving this requirement, there is no doubt that we must humble a little now and admit to ourselves the extent of the student’s weakness.