Projectome of Bumblebee Mushroom Body

Insect brains are exquisite biological microcomputers that allow, in some species, high-precision navigation over miles, face recognition, numerical reasoning and observational learning of actions. The recent studies in fruit fly Drosophila utilized the EM connectomes and genetic tools to reveal how the neural circuits of the Mushroom Body (MB) operate to perform relatively simple associative learning tasks. Here, we propose to discover a comprehensive set of cell types projecting to the MB of bumblebee and identify bee-specific circuit architectures by analysing their projection patterns using X-ray holographic nanotomography (XNH). The resulting “projectome” of the bee’s memory center will be a foundation to pinpoint the key mechanisms of intelligence.