Fly Walker

Imagine a day in the life of the common fruit fly. He wakes up after a few hours of sleep. Using light and smell to guide his movements, he zips around at 30 centimeters per second in search of decaying fruit, dodging obstacles along the way. If he runs into a lady friend, he quivers his wings and sings her a sweet serenade.A simple life, perhaps, and yet extraordinary: Drosophila melanogaster carries out this daily choreography using a brain that’s less than a millimeter across and holds just 100,000 neurons—a tiny fraction of the 75 million in a mouse or 100 billion in a human.Vivek Jayaraman wants to capture, in real time, how the fly’s brain responds to a changing environment. Ultimately, he hopes to uncover very basic patterns—“algorithms”—of fly brain activity that hold true in more complex brains including, presumably, ours.Read more at...HHMI Bulletin, August 2010.