This landmark achievement has been conducted by the FlyWire Consortium, a large international collaboration including researchers from the University of Cambridge, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, Princeton University, and the University of Vermont. It is published today in two papers in the journal Nature.
The diagram of all 139,255 neurons in the adult fly brain is the first of an entire brain for an animal that can walk and see. Previous efforts have completed the whole brain diagrams for much smaller brains, for example a fruit fly larva which has 3,016 neurons, and a nematode worm which has 302 neurons.
The researchers say the whole fly brain map is a key first step to completing larger brains. Since the fruit fly is a common tool in research, its brain map can be used to advance our understanding of how neural circuits work.
Dr Gregory Jefferis, from the University of Cambridge and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular …