Wouldn’t it be fascinating to watch the complex workings of the nervous system in action? A group of scientists achieved just that when they managed to map the nervous system of the larva of a fruit fly.
At Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a team of scientists led by Philipp Keller were able to capture a video of the larva’s nervous system by using a technique called “light-sheet microscopy.”
This involves illuminating the subject from two sides while laser cameras capture footage. In this case the larva was illuminated and the team was able to observe the patterns caused by the signals its nervous system was sending to the brain for movement. “The overall strength of our combined experimental/computational approach is that it enables the simultaneous, unbiased examination of activity relationships among disparate but functionally connected CNS regions,” says the report published by Nature
“This work not only opens the door to large-scale circuit analyses in Drosophila (larva) in particular, but also lays the foundation for a wider set of future studies by providing an integrated strategy for large-scale functional imaging and analysis of neural activity.”
In the past such mapping was only possible for smaller organisms and too slow to capture neural activity accurately. If developed further, this technique could ideally be used for brain mapping to advance research globally.
