Groundbreaking Brain Map Reveals Fruit Fly Brain in Stunning Detail
The approach used to make the map—which heavily relied on artificial intelligence—could chart more complex brains, such as zebrafish, mice, and even humans.
With a brain the size of a sesame seed, the lowly fruit fly is often considered a kitchen pest. But to neuroscientists, the flies are a treasure trove of information detailing how the brain’s intricate connections guide thoughts, decisions, and memories—not just for the critters, but also for us.
Mapping these connections is the first step. With over 140,000 neurons and 54 million synapses—the connections between nerve cells—packed into such a tiny space, the fruit fly’s brain, however rudimentary compared to ours, is highly complex.
This week, in a tour de force, hundreds of scientists from the FlyWire consortium published the first complete map of an adult female fruit fly’s brain. A project roughly a decade in the making, the wiring diagram will be a rich scientific resource for years to come. The same techniques used to make the map—which heavily relied on artificial intelligence—could be used to chart more complex brains, such as zebrafish, mice, and perhaps even humans.
“Flies are important model systems…since their brains solve the same problems as we do,” said Mala Murthy at Princeton University in a press conference. Murthy co-led the project with Sebastian Seung, who has long championed mapping as a way to better understand the inner workings of our brains and potentially extract algorithms to power more flexible AI.
In one of nine articles on the project published by Nature, Clay Reid at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, who was not involved in the project, called the release a “huge deal.”
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