Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ A Blueprint for the Brain's Circadian Clock

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This article summarizes a much longer paper in Nature (20 page PDF) on the circadian clock of the fruit fly. It comprises a connectome of some 240 neurons in the fruit fly brain (compared to some 20,000 neurons in vertebrates), accepting input from photoreceptors and sending output signals from a variety of locations to other fruit fly systems. The authors draw an explicit parallel between the fruit fly system and that found in vertebrates, though they note there are some significant differences as well. The connectome isn't located in one particular place in the brain, but is distributed across a wide range of regions. Utterly fascinating.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 12, 2024 12:30 a.m.

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