Video: The FlyWire connectome
A silent visualisation from FlyWire Princeton of the whole adult fly brain connectome, marking the publication of the FlyWire Consortium’s Nature 2024 papers.
FlyWire Princeton has released a silent visualisation, “The FlyWire Connectome,” rendering the neuron-by-neuron, synapse-by-synapse wiring diagram of the adult fruit fly brain built by the FlyWire Consortium, to mark the publication of its flagship paper and a suite of related papers in a special issue of Nature in October 2024.
FlyWire is a Princeton-led effort, comprising members from more than 146 labs across 122 institutions, with major contributions from teams at the University of Cambridge and the University of Vermont; Sebastian Seung and Mala Murthy of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute are co-senior authors on the flagship paper. Where earlier connectomes covered the 302-neuron C. elegans and the roughly 3,000-neuron larval fly brain, this dataset maps the adult fly brain’s nearly 140,000 neurons and tens of millions of synapses — orders of magnitude more complex, and, at the time, the only full brain connectome for an adult animal of this scale. As Seung put it, “any brain that we truly understand tells us something about all brains.”
This FlyWire connectome is integrated into Virtual Fly Brain alongside our other connectomics resources, letting anyone query, browse and analyse it interactively.
Video: “The FlyWire Connectome”, render by Tyler Sloan, edited by Amy Sterling, © FlyWire Princeton. Score: “Clear Skies” by Scott Buckley (CC-BY 4.0). See also Princeton’s news article and the Nature paper.