FlyWire (FAFB v783)
The whole adult female brain, optic lobes included. The dots on this page come from here.
139,255neurons
~50Msynapses
Story
How the fly got into the computer
Eight years from the first image to a fly that walks, grooms and eats in a virtual world on its own.
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Wiring is not a brain
Bargmann and Marder write the classic paper on why a connectome is not enough: the worm C. elegans has had its wiring map since 1986 and is still hard to understand. The argument goes on today.
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FAFB: a whole female brain imaged
Zheng et al. (Cell) publish an electron microscopy volume of an entire adult fly brain. Still a picture, not a map: every neuron has yet to be traced. ~100,000 neurons
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The hemibrain from Janelia and Google
Half of the central brain, mapped to the synapse. The first big adult insect connectome you can open in a browser through neuPrint. ~25,000 neurons
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The first complete insect brain — a larva
Winding et al. (Science) release the complete brain connectome of a fruit fly larva. 3,016 neurons · 548,000 synapses
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The nerve cord: MANC and FANC
The fly’s “spinal cord” — the ventral nerve cord that runs the legs and wings — is mapped separately, for a male (MANC) and a female (FANC). 23,665 neurons in MANC
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FlyWire: the whole adult brain
Nine papers in Nature. A consortium of 50+ labs and hundreds of volunteers proofread the automatic segmentation of FAFB. The same day, the Shiu model comes out: the whole brain run as a spiking network on a laptop — and it predicts which neurons make a fly eat. 139,255 neurons · 8,453 types
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flyvis: vision from wiring
Lappalainen, Turaga et al. (Nature) build a model of the visual system from the connectome and train it to see motion. Its predictions matched 26 independent experiments.
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NeuroMechFly v2: a body with vision and smell
The Ramdya lab (EPFL) gives the fly a physical body with 87 joints, eyes, smell and sticky feet — in the MuJoCo simulator.
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The male optic lobe
Nern et al. (Nature): the complete wiring of one optic lobe — over a third of all the fly’s neurons live in its eyes. ~53,000 neurons · 732 types
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flybody: a fly from DeepMind and Janelia
A detailed body that walks and flies, steered by neural networks trained with reinforcement learning. No connectome yet — a platform for a future brain.
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The brain on neuromorphic chips
Sandia runs the whole of FlyWire on 12 Intel Loihi 2 chips — hardware that itself computes in spikes.
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Eon Systems: “we uploaded a fly”
A startup puts the Shiu model into the NeuroMechFly body: the fly looks for food, eats and grooms in a virtual world. Loud headlines, harsh criticism — see “Honestly” below.
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BANC and MaleCNS v1.0
Two connectomes in one day. BANC (Nature) is the first to join the brain and nerve cord of one female. Janelia opens MaleCNS — the whole nervous system of a male. ~188,000 neurons in BANC
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MaleCNS in Cell — and Google in the news
The paper on the male’s complete nervous system. Google, who did the segmentation, blogs about it — and the internet notices. 166,700 neurons · 11,710 types · ~125M synapses
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The fly plays Doom
Within a week, dozens of projects: Doom, Mario 64, Minecraft, Beat Saber, crypto trading, haiku, tic-tac-toe and wildfire detection. “Bad Apple” on a fly brain gets 11.5M views. By 12 September the fly had played Doom 6,385 times and never beaten it.