Complete wiring diagram of an adult fruit-fly brain
Complete wiring diagram of an adult fruit-fly brain is graded peer reviewed on whataifound.org, with the AI's role graded ai-assisted.
Machine segmentation of an electron-microscopy volume, corrected by a large community of proofreaders, produced the first synapse-level map of an entire adult brain: 139,255 neurons and roughly 50 million synapses.
- Verification
- Peer reviewed
- Autonomy
- AI-assisted
- Lab
- FlyWire Consortium (Princeton, MRC LMB, Cambridge, Vermont)
- Model
- Automated electron-microscopy segmentation networks
- Field
- Neuroscience
- Date
- 2024-10-02
- Human collaborators
- Sebastian Seung, Mala Murthy, Gregory Jefferis
- Notability
- 2 Wikipedia language editions
What was found
A female Drosophila brain was sliced into about 7,000 sections and imaged by electron microscopy, producing a volume no team could trace by hand. Neural networks segmented the neurons automatically; more than 200 labs and a crowd of proofreaders then corrected the segmentation over several years and annotated over 8,000 cell types. Simulations built directly on the resulting wiring diagram predicted which neurons drive feeding and grooming, and the predictions held up experimentally. Published as a Nature package in October 2024.
Novelty check
Complete connectomes existed for C. elegans (302 neurons, 1986) and the Drosophila larva (3,016 neurons, 2023). This one is roughly 45 times larger than the previous largest complete connectome, and automated segmentation is what made that scale reachable at all.
Caveats
Automated segmentation alone was not accurate enough: the result required years of human proofreading, which is why autonomy is graded ai-assisted rather than ai-led. Neurotransmitter identity is predicted rather than measured for most connections, and gap junctions and neuromodulation are not fully captured. It is one individual's brain, and a wiring diagram is not by itself an explanation of behaviour.
Sources
How this is graded
whataifound.org grades every entry on two axes: verification (how solid the result is, from a machine-checked proof down to refuted) and autonomy (how much the AI did versus its human collaborators). This finding is peer reviewed and ai-assisted. Full definitions are in the methodology.
Cite this entry
whataifound.org (2024). Complete wiring diagram of an adult fruit-fly brain. whataifound.org: A Registry of AI Scientific and Mathematical Discoveries. https://whataifound.org/finding/2024-10-02-flywire-connectome