Complete wiring diagram of an adult fruit-fly brain
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.
- Model
- Automated electron-microscopy segmentation networks
- Field
- Neuroscience
- Date
- 2024-10-02
- Human collaborators
- Sebastian Seung, Mala Murthy, Gregory Jefferis
Sources
Original work
Announcement
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 and known objections
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.
Nobody outside the lab has checked this yet.
Reading the primary source closely enough to say whether it supports the claim counts as a check, and you are credited on the entry.
Or on GitHub: submit a check challenge the grade send a correction or send a pull request
Flag this for triage
Signals order the review queue and nothing else. They are never published, and they never move a grade: that takes a citation.
Entry history (1 event)
- AddedEntered the registry graded Peer reviewed and AI-assisted.
Entries are never deleted. A grade that does not hold up is downgraded on the record, with the reason beside it.
Graded peer reviewed for verification and ai-assisted for autonomy. What these mean.
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-connectomeBibTeX
@misc{whataifound-flywireconsortium-2024-connectome,
title = {Complete wiring diagram of an adult fruit-fly brain},
author = {{whataifound.org}},
year = {2024},
howpublished = {whataifound.org: A Registry of AI Scientific and Mathematical Discoveries},
note = {Result by FlyWire Consortium (Princeton, MRC LMB, Cambridge, Vermont). Verification: Peer reviewed. Autonomy: AI-assisted.},
url = {https://whataifound.org/finding/2024-10-02-flywire-connectome}
}