The FlyWire Connectome

Neuronal wiring diagram of a whole brain, Nature 2024:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158...

For many heartbreaking diseases of the brain — dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and others — doctors can only treat the symptoms. Medical science does not have a cure.

Why? Because it’s difficult to cure what we don’t understand, and the human brain, with its billions of neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses, is almost hopelessly complex.

“FlyWire,” a Princeton-led team of scientists and citizen scientists, has now made a massive step toward understanding the human brain by building a neuron-by-neuron and synapse-by-synapse roadmap — scientifically speaking, a “connectome” — through the brain of an adult fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). The FlyWire Consortium comprises members from more than 146 labs at 122 institutions, with major contributions from teams at the University of Cambridge and the University of Vermont.

“Any brain that we truly understand tells us something about all brains,” said Sebastian Seung, Princeton’s Evnin Professor in Neuroscience and a professor of computer science. “With the fly wiring diagram, we have the potential for an unprecedented, detailed and deep understanding.”

Previous researchers have mapped the brain of a C. elegans worm, with its 302 neurons, and the brain of a larval fruit fly, which had 3,000 neurons, but the adult fruit fly is several orders of magnitude more complex, with almost 140,000 neurons and tens of millions of synapses connecting them.

“This is a major achievement,” said Mala Murthy, director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and, with Seung, a leader of the research team. “There is no other full brain connectome for an adult animal of this complexity.”

The results of their work are featured in a special issue of the journal Nature about transformational research into the fruit fly brain. Seung and Murthy are co-senior authors on the flagship paper of the issue, which includes a suite of nine related papers with overlapping sets of authors, led by researchers from Princeton University, the University of Vermont, the University of Cambridge, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Würzburg, Columbia University, UC-Santa Barbara, Freie Universität-Berlin, the University of Michigan, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, and the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience.

Read more: https://www.princeton.edu/news/2024/1...


Render by Tyler Sloan. Edited by Amy Sterling

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