Taiwanese researchers at a biotechnology fair in Taipei have showcased the initial results of their efforts to map fruit flies’ brains, which they said will pave the way for mapping the human brain to find treatments for diseases that cannot be cured today.
“Just like humans, fruit flies can also suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, depression, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or autism,” said Chiang Ann-shyn (江安世), director of National Tsing Hua University’s Brain Research Center, on the sidelines of the Bio Taiwan fair that runs from Thursday to today.
More understanding
“When we understand the neural circuits of a fruit fly’s brain, we will be able to know which neuronal cells or genes go wrong and then fix them,” he said.
Chiang, in charge of the project, said the research team’s technology allows 3D visualization of internal structures at cellular and sub-cellular levels, with high resolution and without tissue embedding and sectioning.
The same concept can be applied to eventually mapping and understanding the human brain, Chiang said.
BRAIN MAP
“The key thing we lack today is such a brain map,” he said. “We hope to create a Google Earth of the human brain in the future and provide it to scientists around the world to use.”
“In the future, scientists can just use this system and search for certain brain networks or gene expressions,” he said.
The field of brain mapping is at the cutting edge of biotechnology. Only a small number of top institutes in the world are undertaking such research.
The government has already identified the research team’s technologies as one of the country’s six potential star industries in the future.
So far, the Chiang-led research team has achieved initial results in mapping a small part of a fruit fly’s brain, which has 130,000 neurons, but a human brain is 100,000 times more complex than that of a fruit fly.
3D TECHNOLOGY
Chiang also envisions that in 10 years, medical doctors will be able to rely on a 3D visualization of every human organ to facilitate their treatment of diseases.
At the fair, the research team set up a small theater to allow visitors to see a 3D presentation of the mapped parts of a fruit fly’s brain on a big screen.
The research team colored different neurons in the 3D picture of the brain, which can be turned horizontally and vertically, and can be zoomed in and out, to help viewers better understand the structure of the neurological systems.
Yao Chih-min (姚志明), deputy director-general of the National Center for High-Performance Computing, who is part of the research team, explained why the team chose fruit flies as the subject of their experiments.
“It’s because they are low-cost and easy to obtain, “ he said. “You can get only one single neuron when you kill a fruit fly, so you can imagine how many of them have been sacrificed in order to build the database we see now.”
Chiang urged the government to help step up development of this field as rival foreign research teams have allocated far more investment and resources than Taiwan.
“Other countries also see this field as the future and they can outperform us, even though they started later than we did,” he said.
It will take a long time for any team in the world to map the human brain because of its complexity, Yao said.
Foreign tourists who purchase a seven-day Taiwan Pass are to get a second one free of charge as part of a government bid to boost tourism, the Tourism Administration said yesterday. A pair of Taiwan Passes is priced at NT$5,000 (US$156.44), an agency staff member said, adding that the passes can be used separately. The pass can be used in many of Taiwan’s major cities and to travel to several tourist resorts. It expires seven days after it is first used. The pass is a three-in-one package covering the high-speed rail system, mass rapid transport (MRT) services and the Taiwan Tourist Shuttle services,
Drinking a lot of water or milk would not help a person who has ingested terbufos, a toxic chemical that has been identified as the likely cause of three deaths, a health expert said yesterday. An 83-year-old woman surnamed Tseng (曾) and two others died this week after eating millet dumplings with snails that Tseng had made. Tseng died on Tuesday and others ate the leftovers when they went to her home to mourn her death that evening. Twelve people became ill after eating the dumplings following Tseng’s death. Their symptoms included vomiting and convulsions. Six were hospitalized, with two of them
DIVA-READY: The city’s deadline for the repairs is one day before pop star Jody Chiang is to perform at the Taipei Dome for the city’s Double Ten National Day celebrations The Taipei City Government has asked Farglory Group (遠雄集團) to repair serious water leaks in the Taipei Dome before Friday next week, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) said yesterday, following complaints that many areas at the stadium were leaking during two baseball games over the weekend. The dome on Saturday and Sunday hosted two games in tribute to CTBC Brothers’ star Chou Szu-chi (周思齊) ahead of his retirement from the CPBL. The games each attracted about 40,000 people, filling the stadium to capacity. However, amid heavy rain, many people reported water leaking on some seats, at the entrance and exit areas, and the
BIG collection: The herbarium holds more than 560,000 specimens, from the Japanese colonial period to the present, including the Wulai azalea, which is now extinct in the wild The largest collection of plant specimens in Taiwan, the Taipei Botanical Garden’s herbarium, is celebrating its 100th anniversary with an exhibition that opened on Friday. The herbarium provides critical historical documents for botanists and is the first of its kind in Taiwan, Taiwan Forestry Research Institute director Tseng Yen-hsueh (曾彥學) said. It is housed in a two-story red brick building, which opened during 1924. At the time, it stored 30,000 plant specimens from almost 6,000 species, including Taiwanese plant samples collected by Tomitaro Makino, the “father of Japanese botany,” Tseng said. The herbarium collection has grown in the century since its