Complete Fruit Fly Brain Connectome Advances Understanding of Essential Brain Functions in Health and Disease

Posted onOctober 24th, 2024byDr. Monica M. Bertagnolli

Youve surely seen fruit flies in your kitchen, perhaps hovering around a bowl of citrus fruits or over a glass of wine. While these insects might not seem especially brainy, typical fruit fly behaviors depend on a complex brain thats wired to solve many of the same problems human brains do. Their nervous systems and brains must pick up on tempting scents and send the right signals through their bodies to move from one place to another to find food. Fruit flies form long-term memories, engage in social interactions with other fruit flies, and navigate over long distances. Though smaller than a poppy seed, the fruit fly brain is packed with hundreds of thousands of neurons and millions of neural connections all wired precisely to make those behavioral feats possible.

Now, a scientific team supported by the NIHBrain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, or The BRAIN Initiative, has unveiled the first complete map, or connectome, of every neural connection within the brain of an adult female fruit fly. This important milestone in brain science, reported in nine papers inNature, details more than 50 million connections between nearly 140,000 neurons. As the first complete map of a connectome of any adult animal, it offers critical information about how complex brains are wired to send and receive signals underlying normal brain functions.