Map of fruit fly brain gives major insights

The first map of the entire brain of a fruit fly has been published, promising to provide unprecedented knowledge into how the brain works and what goes wrong in different diseases.

The FlyWire Consortium, an international team led by Princeton University, New Jersey, USA, and including EARA members, the Freie Universität-Berlin, and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany, successfully documented more than 50 million connections between almost 140,000 neurons in the brain of the adult fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster).

This makes it the largest such map (connectome) that has been created – similar projects in roundworms and larval fruit flies only mapped 302 and 3,000 neurons, respectively.

Speaking to BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh, Mala Murthy, at Princeton, said: “It will help researchers trying to better understand how a healthy brain works. In the future we hope that it will be possible to compare what happens when things go wrong in our brains.”

The feat was possible thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), which analysed millions of images of the fruit fly brain and traced the different connections between neurons.

Reaching the final connectome, however, still required proofreading by a global cohort of researchers to correct any mistakes that AI made