Scientists Map Entire Fruit Fly Brain in Breakthrough Study, Paving Way for Human Brain Research
Scientists have reached a major milestone in neurobiology by mapping the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, offering insights that could one day help us understand human brains.
The research, conducted by an international team called the FlyWire Consortium, mapped over 50 million connections between 139,000 neurons in the tiny brain of Drosophila melanogaster. The detailed study was published in Nature and has been hailed as a "huge leap" in neuroscience.
Gregory Jefferis, a neuroscientist from the University of Cambridge and one of the project’s leaders, emphasised how important this is for understanding brain function.
“What are the connections? How do the signals flow through the system that can let us process information?” Jefferis explained.
The research team hopes this map, known as a connectome, will shed light on how brains—no matter their size—allow animals to think, act, and interact with their environment.
The fruit fly was chosen for its manageable size, and though it may seem like an unusual choice, flies are surprisingly complex. Their brains are responsible for sophisticated behaviours like walking, flying, and even social interactions.
As Princeton neuroscientist Mala Murthy put it, “Their brains solve many of the same problems we do.”
These findings could ultimately help scientists better understand brain functions across many species, including humans.
Scientists discover why we struggle to swat flies
One particularly fascinating discovery was how flies respond when they’re about to be swatted. The visual system, which processes motion and colour, sends strong signals to the legs to jump away quickly. This might explain why flies always seem to evade our attempts to swat them—literally jumping faster than they can think.
Scientists use AI to map the brain
Mapping the fruit fly brain was no easy feat. Scientists sliced the brain into 7,000 sections and used artificial intelligence to digitally stitch them back together. However, the AI wasn’t perfect. Researchers still had to correct over three million mistakes manually, making the effort both a technical and human triumph.
The adult fruit fly’s brain wiring is far more complex than simpler organisms like worms or fly larvae, which have been studied before. This complexity makes the findings even more valuable.
For example, the team uncovered "hub neurons" that accelerate information flow in the brain, which could explain how tiny brains perform such impressive tasks.
Connectome is first toward understand wiring of human brains
While the human brain is a million times bigger than that of a fruit fly, scientists believe this connectome is a crucial first step toward understanding our own neural wiring.
"When we understand it, hopefully then we can rewire it or fix it in some cases where things go wrong," Jefferis noted.
This research may eventually lead to breakthroughs in treating neurological disorders or improving brain function, although scientists acknowledge that mapping a human brain is still decades away.
