In the brain of a singular fruit fly, nerve cells weave themselves together, enabling flight, mating, eating, sleeping and every other activity of her fly life. Now, in nine papers published October 2 in Nature, scientists report the first complete map of her nerve cells — all 139,255 of them, to be exact — and their 54.5 million connections.
This whole-brain map, traced over years with painstaking precision, is tiny but exquisite: It holds 149.2 meters of neural wiring, all tidily packed into a brain about the size of a poppy seed. As such, this map shows how neural information might flow among cells in Drosophila melanogaster, an animal
→ Continue reading at Science News