Flip a switch on the wall, and it turns on a light across the room through a simple circuit. Now add 140,000 other switches and try and figure out which one controls the light. That is similar to the challenge undertaken by an international consortium of researchers, partially supported by the NSF Next Generation Networks for Neuroscience (NSF NeuroNex) program, who have worked to map all of the connections in the brain of an adult fruit fly. The map, known as a connectome, will aid in understanding the inner workings of the brain and how it controls behavior and is already spurring new experiments and models.

Fruit flies may be very small, but mapping their brain is no easy task. There are on the order of 140,000 neurons and over 8,000 cell types identified in the newly published connectome. The research team used automation and artificial intelligence to piece together the connections from data created using electron microscopy.  This connectome is the largest created to date, with some of the same researchers previously publishing a map of a larval fruit fly brain that was at the time the largest connectome created.   

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