Breakthroughs don’t often happen in neuroscience, but we just had one. In a tour-de-force, an international team released the full brain connectivity map of the young fruit fly, described in a paper published last week in Science. Containing 3,016 neurons and 548,000 synapses, the map—called a connectome—is the most complex whole-brain wiring diagram to date.
“It’s a ‘wow,’” said Dr. Shinya Yamamoto at Baylor College of Medicine, who was not involved in the work.
Why care about a fruit fly? Far from uninvited guests at the dinner table, Drosophila melanogaster is a neuroscience darling. Although its brain is smaller than a poppy seed—a far cry from the 100 billion neurons that power human brains—the fly’s neural system shares similar principles to those that underlie our own brains.
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