The FlyWire connectome: neuronal wiring diagram of a complete fly brain

Artificial intelligence and human expertise meet to generate a map of all the connections in the fly brain. The resource is already being used by experimentalists and theoreticians to further our understanding of neural circuits in the fly and beyond.

TThe fundamental unit of the nervous system is the neuron. Individual neurons are connected by synapses to form circuits. Evolution has driven the formation of ever more elaborate circuits to enable complex behaviours, such as social interactions, navigation and even flying. A foundational step in understanding the nervous system is to know the complete connectivity of the circuits down to the synapse level — a field of neuroscience known as ‘connectomics’. This is easier said than done because even small animals, such as flies, have hundreds of thousands of neurons and millions of synapses. As a result, we only have a complete connectome for very simple nervous systems containing orders of magnitude fewer neurons than the fly. ‘FlyWire’, built a consortium comprising researchers spread over 127 institutions that set out to provide the first ever complete connectome of the entire adult fly (Drosophila melanogaster) brain.

Examples of identified neurons, colour coded by neural type, followed by a rendering of all the identified neurons in the fly brain. Credit: Amy Sterling, Murthy and Seung Labs, Princeton University

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