Complete connectome of male fly brain mapped, revealing sex-specific neural circuits
An international team led by the University of Cambridge has mapped all 166,700 neurons and their millions of connections in the male Drosophila fly brain and nerve cord, producing the first full-scale connectome of an adult animal's brain ever completed. By comparing this male connectome with the previously mapped female fly brain, researchers identified how neurons reroute sensory information into sex-specific behavioural circuits—for example, male flies respond to the smell of another male with aggression while females respond with courtship behaviour. The study, published in Cell, used high-resolution electron microscopy and AI to reconstruct individual neurons and synapses, with the dataset now available as a public resource for other researchers.
