🇺🇸 영어 원문
A large international research team led by groups at Harvard Medical School and Princeton University has reached a major neuroscience milestone by publishing a complete map of every connection between neurons in the central nervous system of an adult fruit fly.
The achievement gives scientists a new way to examine how the brain and body work together to produce complex actions, including walking and flying. It also opens the door to broader studies of the core rules that govern nervous systems.
"We can see all of the neurons and their connections as a complete unit for the first time and ask, ‘What do we learn from that?’" said study co-senior author Rachel Wilson, the Joseph B. Martin Professor of Basic Research in the Field of Neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.
The new map of neural connections, known as a connectome, extends a previously published fruit fly brain connectome by adding the fly’s spinal cord equivalent, called the nerve cord.
"It is really important to have a central nervous system connectome that is as complete as possible so we can link up the brain and body and start thinking about behavior holistically," said study co-senior author Wei-Chung Allen Lee, associate professor of neurobiology at HMS and HMS professor of neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital.
When the team studied the connectome, they discovered that many fruit fly behaviors appear to be directed by local neural circuits in the relevant body parts, rather than by one central command area in the brain.
The full connectome is now freely available online, giving researchers around the world a powerful new resource for neuroscience studies. The work, published June 8 in Nature, received support in part from U.S. federal funding, including the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation.
One of neuroscience’s major unanswered questions is how neurons in the brain and body connect and coordinate to generate behavior. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a valuable model for exploring that problem.
Fruit flies are simple to breed and keep in the lab. Although their nervous system contains only about 160,000 neurons, they can still perform complex behaviors such as navigating, interacting socially, learning, and reacting to sensory signals. They also have what Lee describes as an incredibly sophisticated genetic toolkit, which allows scientists to access, control, and record activity from single neurons or groups of neurons.
In 2024, the FlyWire Consortium, led by Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung at Princeton, who are also co-authors of the new study, published a complete connectome of a fruit fly brain. At the same time, Lee and his colleagues were building a connectome of the fruit fly nerve cord, which controls the legs, wings, and other appendages while also processing sensory information.
"The brain and nerve cord connectomes are each useful on their own, but until you can bridge the two, it’s hard to understand how information moves between the brain and the body," said co-first author Helen Yang, a research fellow in neurobiology in the Wilson Lab.
Co-first author Alexander Bates, also a research fellow in neurobiology in the Wilson Lab, noted that the brain holds most of the neurons, but the nerve cord contains neurons that are "some of the most useful" because they are tied to sensation.
🇰🇷 한국어 요약
하버드 의과대학과 프린스턴 대학을 중심으로 한 국제 연구팀이 성체 초파리의 중추신경계에 있는 모든 뉴런 연결을 매핑하는 데 성공했습니다. 이를 통해 과학자들은 뇌와 몸이 어떻게 협력하여 걷기나 비행 같은 복잡한 행동을 만들어내는지 더 깊이 이해할 수 있게 되었습니다. 특히 이번 연구는 뇌뿐만 아니라 척수에 해당하는 ‘신경줄’까지 포함한 완전한 지도를 공개했다는 점에서 의미가 큽니다. 연구 결과, 많은 행동이 뇌의 한곳에서 통제되는 것이 아니라 몸의 각 부분에 있는 신경 회로에 의해 조절될 수 있다는 사실을 발견했습니다. 이 자료는 전 세계 연구자들에게 무료로 제공되어 신경과학 연구에 큰 자원이 될 것입니다.
🔑 핵심 단어 (Vocabulary)
- Connectome – 신경 연결 지도 – The new map of neural connections, known as a connectome, extends a previously published fruit fly brain connectome.
- Neurons – 뉴런 (신경세포) – A large international research team… has reached a major neuroscience milestone by publishing a complete map of every connection between neurons.
- Nervous System – 신경계 – It is really important to have a central nervous system connectome that is as complete as possible.
- Holistically – 전체적으로, 종합적으로 – So we can link up the brain and body and start thinking about behavior holistically.
- Circuits – 회로 (신경 회로) – Many fruit fly behaviors appear to be directed by local neural circuits in the relevant body parts.
- Model – 모델 (연구 대상) – The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a valuable model for exploring that problem.
- Sophisticated – 정교한, 고도의 – They also have what Lee describes as an incredibly sophisticated genetic toolkit.
- Coordinate – 조정하다, 협력하다 – One of neuroscience’s major unanswered questions is how neurons in the brain and body connect and coordinate to generate behavior.
- Appendages – 부속물 (다리, 날개 등) – Lee and his colleagues were building a connectome of the fruit fly nerve cord, which controls the legs, wings, and other appendages.
- Sensory – 감각의 – They can still perform complex behaviors such as navigating, interacting socially, learning, and reacting to sensory signals.
🔗 원문 링크
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260610003047.htm