New ‘connectome’ shows all 124 million contact points in the fruit fly’s nervous system

A speck in a dish—that’s all the nervous system of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster looks like to the naked eye. But look closely enough and it resolves into a network of 166,700 nerve cells connected through 124.2 million synapses.

The intricate map—called a connectome—has been published in a package of four papers in Cell, marking the end of an ambitious 20-year research project.

Learn more: https://scim.ag/3UKkh1S

FOOTAGE CREDIT: PHILIP HUBBARD/HHMI JANELIA RESEARCH CAMPUS

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