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Method Rapidly Reconstructs Animal's Development Cell By Cell
An anonymous reader writes Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus have developed software that can track each and every cell in a developing embryo. The software will allow a researcher to pick out a single cell at any point in development and trace its life backward and forward during the embryo's growth. Philipp Keller, a group leader at Janelia says: "We want to reconstruct the elemental building plan of animals, tracking each cell from very early development until late stages, so that we know everything that has happened in terms of cell movement and cell division. In particular, we want to understand how the nervous system forms. Ultimately, we would like to collect the developmental history of every cell in the nervous system and link that information to the cell's final function. For this purpose, we need to be able to follow individual cells on a fairly large scale and over a long period of time."
When they can track everything every individual cell has ever done, you know it's time to rein in the surveillance state.
Seriously though, promising tech.
No.
What it MIGHT give you, eventually, is a set of observations on which to model the synhetic generation of nervous systems (and whole organisms if you have the CPU and memory to blow) within a computational model framework.
What can you do with an emulated nervous system?
Outside of medical research and drug candidate evaluations-- perhaps it could be useful for developing BCIs and the like-- but without a considerable amount more data than just what cells turn into what other cells, the model wont be useful for much.
Also, full nervous system emulation is about the worst possible way to approach strong AI. Just saying.
Models like these are useful for making inexpensive testbeds to test hypotheses against, after said models are vetted-- that's what they are for. They arent for doing non-science with.
It only tracks the nuclei (which will provide very little information about a nervous system) from existing image data. It is not currently not even possible to image how the final nervous system of a fruit fly is setup so that this software could be run. They are too thick and opaque for any current microscopy technique to use while alive. Philipp Keller also developed a microscopy technique for imaging this type of data. I've tried using it on flies, and it doesn't work.
Both -- track the entire tree. Seems like an obvious thing to try...on retrospect.
Once you know this, you can start looking for conttol mechanisms at the DNA and chemistry level.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.