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First of Its Kind: The Fruit Fly Connectome Has Been Mapped

The Universalist

The Universalist

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First of Its Kind: The Fruit Fly Connectome Has Been Mapped
A visualization of some of the neurons in a fruit fly brain and the connections between them. // Press materials FlyWire / Princeton University

Members of the scientific consortium known as FlyWire first scanned fruit fly brains in detail using an electron microscope, then identified 140,000 neurons and 54.5 million connections between them, and provided their full description. 

By Łukasz Kwiatek

More than 120 years have passed since the pioneering work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who painstakingly stained dissected neurons using complex techniques and discovered that they do not constitute a uniform, disordered mass but an extraordinarily complex network. And yet we are constantly reminded that neuroscience is a very young field, and that every important discovery about the brain raises a host of new questions — and, above all, reveals the scale of our ignorance.

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