Neuroscientists making computers smart enough to see connections between brain's neurons
Thursday, January 28, 2010 - 18:35
in Biology & Nature
(PhysOrg.com) -- C. elegans, a tiny worm about a millimeter long, doesn`t have much of a brain, but it has a nervous system - one that comprises 302 nerve cells, or neurons, to be exact. In the 1970s, a team of researchers at Cambridge University decided to create a complete `wiring diagram` of how each of those neurons are connected to one another. Such wiring diagrams have recently been christened `connectomes,` drawing on their similarity to the genome, the total DNA sequence of an organism. The C. elegans connectome, reported in 1986, took more than a dozen years of tedious labor to find.