I don't think that drosophila are eutelic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutely) so no two flies have precisely the same cells at precisely the same locations (that's true for c. elegans, whose connectome is probably the best studied).
The large-scale architecture will be roughly the same between any two individuals. You would likely need some sort of mapping (like an embedding) to generalize. It's definitely an active area of research.
Fortunately, the whole chain of slicing, imaging, and analysis are now at least partially automated, so in theory you can repeat the process with nothing more than some time on the equipment and a bit of compute.
In practice, I suspect there's a fair bit of grad student manual labor that keeps the pipeline flowing...
I don't think that's correct- the nature article about the article says they don't, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y and drosophila are not eutelic (although I see that some insects do have "partial constancy"). Could you ask the author to clarify?
Looking in the paper more closely they say:
"""After matching, Schlegel et al.12 also compared our wiring diagram with the hemibrain where they overlap and showed that cell-type counts and strong connections were largely in agreement. This means that the combined effects of natural variability across individuals and ‘noise’ due to imperfect reconstruction tend to be modest, so our wiring diagram of a single brain should be useful for studying any wild-type Drosophila melanogaster individual. However, there are known differences between the brains of male and female flies46. In addition, principal neurons of the mushroom body, a brain structure required for olfactory learning and memory, show high variability12. Some mushroom body connectivity patterns have even been found to be near random47, although deviations from randomness have since been identified48. In short, Drosophila wiring diagrams are useful because of their stereotypy, yet also open the door to studies of connectome variation."""
i woudl expect the overall architecture to be the same, but not the cell identities or the connections. But as always, I'm happy to be shown wrong with facts.
dekhn|1 year ago
The large-scale architecture will be roughly the same between any two individuals. You would likely need some sort of mapping (like an embedding) to generalize. It's definitely an active area of research.
BurningFrog|1 year ago
Then you analyze the slice images and determine the neurons and their connection. This is the hard part, and the breakthrough is an AI based method.
Pretty sure they've only mapped one brain so far.
LeifCarrotson|1 year ago
In practice, I suspect there's a fair bit of grad student manual labor that keeps the pipeline flowing...
twarge|1 year ago
Happened to go for a walk with the corresponding author and made her repeat this fact for me.
dekhn|1 year ago
Looking in the paper more closely they say: """After matching, Schlegel et al.12 also compared our wiring diagram with the hemibrain where they overlap and showed that cell-type counts and strong connections were largely in agreement. This means that the combined effects of natural variability across individuals and ‘noise’ due to imperfect reconstruction tend to be modest, so our wiring diagram of a single brain should be useful for studying any wild-type Drosophila melanogaster individual. However, there are known differences between the brains of male and female flies46. In addition, principal neurons of the mushroom body, a brain structure required for olfactory learning and memory, show high variability12. Some mushroom body connectivity patterns have even been found to be near random47, although deviations from randomness have since been identified48. In short, Drosophila wiring diagrams are useful because of their stereotypy, yet also open the door to studies of connectome variation."""
i woudl expect the overall architecture to be the same, but not the cell identities or the connections. But as always, I'm happy to be shown wrong with facts.
baanist|1 year ago
andbberger|1 year ago