Are all fruit fry brains the same? Does anyone know what has actually been mapped and why it would generalize from one fruit fly to the next?
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.
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.
In practice, I suspect there's a fair bit of grad student manual labor that keeps the pipeline flowing...
Happened to go for a walk with the corresponding author and made her repeat this fact for me.
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.