Connectome of zebrafish olfactory bulb. Click to enlarge.
One of the fundamental questions in neuroscience is how neuronal circuits are wired to process information. The research group led by Rainer Friedrich has developed new methods to determine the complex morphology of densely packed neurons and their synaptic connections by 3D electron microscopy. As reported , these methods allowed them to reconstruct the entire olfactory bulb of a zebrafish larva, comprising more than 1000 neurons. They found that neuronal projections in the olfactory bulb are widely distributed but not randomly organized. Rather, the network contains modules that receive similar input, which are more likely to be interconnected than others. This study marks a step forward in the emerging field of connectomics. The power of the brain arises from teamwork: although each neuron is slow compared to a computer, networks of neurons outperform computers on complex tasks.
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