News Neuroscience

Scientists have traced all 54.5 million connections in a fruit fly’s brain

The new ‘connectome’ hints at how information flows

Digital reconstructions of blue, pink and purple cells make up a fruit fly brain, which is on a white background.

The first full map of fruit fly’s brain charted 139,255 nerve cells and their millions of connections.

Tyler Sloan for FlyWire, Princeton University, (Dorkenwald et al/Nature, 2024)

By Laura Sanders

In the brain of a singular fruit fly, nerve cells weave themselves together, enabling flight, mating, eating, sleeping and every other activity of her fly life. Now, in nine papers published October 2 in Nature, scientists report the first complete map of her nerve cells — all 139,255 of them, to be exact — and their 54.5