Google and Janelia researchers map male fruit fly brain

Researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus and Google have completed a comprehensive map of a male fruit fly’s central nervous system. This achievement provides a complete connectome, detailing the physical structure and wiring of the brain and the ventral nerve cord, which functions similarly to a vertebrate spinal cord.

The dataset includes approximately 166,691 neurons and roughly 11,700 cell types, connected by hundreds of millions of synapses. This follows the earlier completion of a female Drosophila connectome, allowing scientists to compare the neural wiring diagrams between sexes for the first time. The reconstruction serves as a searchable physical map of the organism's anatomy rather than a functional recording of activity.