How the map of one tiny fruit fly brain could lead to vital information about how larger ones work.

A Princeton University led team of scientists has built the first ever neuron by neuron roadmap through the brain of an adult fruit fly.

That's important because the research is considered a stepping stone to understanding brains of more complex species like humans.

Ted Goldberg has the story.

This is the brain of the fly.

There's a 150 meters of wire inside a fly brain.

If you look at the images, the raw images of a brain, it looks like just an incredibly messy, tangled pile of spaghetti.

Princeton researchers have cooked up something interesting from this pile of spaghetti connecting or detailed map of all brain connections in a fruit fly.

These are the visual projection neurons that collect information in those optic lobes and send them to the center of the brain.

Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung organized an international group of researchers and contributors called Fly Wire, dedicated to mapping out the functions of the brain of a fruit fly.

Most people don't think that the fruit flies in their kitchen, have a social life, but they do.

Males sing these elaborate courtship songs.

They dance around the female females perceive those songs.

They interpret the way in which the male moves.

Just like some people, these researchers used A.I.

to comb through 21 million pictures taken by an electron microscope.

And they put together these 3-D diagrams showing different connections in the brains of fruit flies.

Dr. Seung says building connect domes isn't new, but it's advanced a lot over the last decade.

The first connect was of a tiny worm called C elegans with just 300 neurons.

It was published in 1986 and the images were all analyzed by hand.

It took over a dozen years to do it.

And so after 1986, it was, I guess, such a traumatic experience that there was a connecting winter.

Nobody wanted to do it again.

The Kinect film was unveiled last year, but now it's been peer reviewed and published.

Some scientists who've looked at the data have used it to help make discoveries of their own.

Flies are extremely visual animals.

The majority of their neurons are visual.

And so we have groundbreaking discoveries about how the visual system of the fly works.

There are about 140,000 neurons in the brain of a fruit fly, and human brains have about 86 billion neurons.

But Dr. Seung and Dr. Murthy say this research could pave the way for mapping our brains in the future.

The technological framework we use to build the fly map.

The fly Kinect serves as sort of the stepping stone for building bigger connect hubs like a mouse brain or a monkey brain or even a human brain.

Even at the circuit level, if we look at the networks of neurons inside the brain, there is kind of a kind of architectural similarity.

It's like if you look at a small building in a big building, you might see some common elements like an arch.

While it's too early to make sweeping predictions.

Dr. Murthy says this research could have a huge impact on medicine.

We think that actually we can use this map of a healthy fly brain to start to understand how mis wiring leads to dysfunction.

So you could imagine if we had a model of the full brain that we could simulate to generate fly behavior, that we could start to play with the wires and see how we could correct them or degrade them to generate dysfunction.

That could be a long way off.

But as scientists and researchers continue their work, it may not be as far down the line as we think.

In Princeton, I'm Ted Goldberg NJ Spotlight News.