One brain fits all

Martin Heisenberg (University of Würzburg, Germany) is attempting to move fly neurobiology from the qualitative to the quantitative. With his colleagues, Heisenberg has constructed a Drosophila standard brain. He hopes that researchers will contribute to the model by adding expression patterns of their favorite genes and will use the model to characterize mutants.

“Conceptually, anatomy has always been single case studies,” says Heisenberg. A few years ago he saw an opportunity to change this situation. Scientists now had the computing power and confocal microscopy expertise needed to compare multiple, entire fly brains. When Heisenberg did so, he found that the brain images could be superimposed with only a 15% standard deviation, thus yielding the standard brain.This was the standard brain for the Canton-S fly strain, which has been wandering around food vials for over 1,000 generations. But when Heisenberg made...