Discovery: Female flies have more neurons than males

DiscoveryFemale flies have more neurons than males

EPFL has developed a novel technique for observing the brains of fruit fly larvae.

VQH

EPFL has developed a new technique to accurately observe the number of neurons present in the brains of Drosophila larvae, also called vinegar flies. The first results show, among other things, that female larvae have 10% more neurons than males.

“At the larval stage, Drosophila has no external sex organ. So we were surprised to see such a big difference,” explains Brian McCabe, lead author of the study and professor at EPFL’s Faculty of Life Sciences. Thus, it was possible to predict which sex a larva will be with 99% success, simply by observing the difference in neurons, continue the researchers.

Now that they have precisely determined the number of brain cells that Drosophila larvae have, the scientists want to study how neurons connect to each other and their function in the brain by combining several technologies.

Schematic of the pipeline of molecular genetics, microscopy and computational technologies used to count cells in the whole brain of the Drosophila larva.

B. McCabe (EPFL)

(Comm/jba)

Discovery: Female flies have more neurons than males