ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — Over the last 10 years, more than 600 scientists at 150 labs have collaborated toward one goal: to map the entire brain of a fruit fly all in the hope of better understanding how our own brain works. You might ask though: Why a fruit fly or why not just start with our own brain if that’s what we want to understand? According to Gabriella Sterne, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Genetics, Biology, and Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center, it’s an issue of complexity. “So the fruit fly brain has about 140,000 neurons, and those neurons are connected together by about 50 million synapses. And if you compare that to the human brain, the human brain has about 86 billion neurons connected together by trillions of synapses. So if you think about the human, the fly brain versus the human brain, it's really just orders of magnitude more complex.” Remember to map just those 140,000 neurons and 50,000,000 synapses, it took 10 years, hundreds of people, and even help from AI. Despite the difference in complexity between the two brains, it’s hoped that the basic concepts behind how the fruit fly’s brain communicates with itself and the fly is similar to how our own brain does with us.  “We want to understand some basic principles via which groups of neurons work together, and we think that those principles will be the same between the fly and the human,” said Sterne.  “So we're not 100% sure that that's true yet, right? But we do think that we can really glean some fundamental principles about brain function through this work that's going to make it easier for us to untangle how the human brain works.” Before joining URMC Sterne was focused on work just like she describes above at UC Berkeley alongside her collaborator, Phillip Shue. Who developed a program to help map different electrical impulses as they traveled through the fly’s brain to understand how different actions activated different groups of neurons.  But there is so much that can and is being done with the information they’ve gathered in the connectome, or the map of the fruit fly’s brain. In the short term the hope is to make the process of mapping a brain more efficient, so when it comes time to step up to a more complex brain, like that of a mouse, the time required won’t scale up with the complexity. As Sterne put it, “Instead of taking 1,000 years. Maybe it takes 10 years.” But there is more at stake here too, if these researchers can start to tap into how the brain operates on a basic level, it opens up more and more doors for helping those impacted by neurological and other disorders.  “[What] I think we can learn is those unifying principles of brain function. And if we can learn those in the fly, it will be that much easier to get the same principles of brain function in a human. And if we understand the basic principles of how the brain works, then it's going to be that much easier to understand how things go wrong in neurological disorders or disease states that impact brain function,” said Sterne. You can read more about Sterne’s work on the University of Rochester Medical Center’s website, and also more about the larger project on FlyWire.ai.