Studies conducted by a team from the Brain Research Center at Hsinchu-based National Tsing Hua University may hold the key to understanding human behavior and developing therapy for disorders caused by the Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
“A major challenge in neuroscience is to comprehend how internal brain circuits interpret the world and create memories underlying learning and behavior,” said Chiang Ann-shyn, the team’s lead researcher, June 25.
“Understanding how the information flows and turns in the complex brain networks has great and fundamental implication in not only biomedicine but also neuro-inspired engineering,” he added.
With support from the National Science Council, the team discovered a shunting mechanism for gating information flow in parallel neural circuits. Using a virtual fly brain database containing thousands of single neurons, the team predicted and validated neural circuits relaying olfactory information to higher centers in the Drosophila brain.
The team found that odor information takes specific pathways in the brain, depending on concentration context in order to orchestrate locomotive behavior.
“Our finding is the first to show that there are parallel neuronal pathways for signal processing and mechanisms that allow information shunting in the brain,” Chiang said. “It would be truly exciting if such a mechanism also occurs in the human brain.”
The research was published in the June 14 issue of Science as “Parallel Neural Pathways Mediate CO2 Avoidance Responses in Drosophila.”
A renowned neuroscientist, Chiang has been working on brain research for over a decade. The New York Times ran a story on his study in December 2010, when he bar-coded 16,000 of the 100,000 neurons in a fruit fly’s brain and reconstructed its wiring map.
The scientist caught the attention of U.S-based NBC News in October 2012 when he identified two genes critical to forming long-term memories, again by studying the brains of fruit flies. (JSM)
Write to Meg Chang at sfchang@mofa.gov.tw