Janelia's FlyEM team released a complete wiring map of a male fruit fly central nervous system. It covers the central brain, the optic lobes and the ventral nerve cord in one specimen. The neck connection between brain and nerve cord stays intact, and the whole map is proofread and annotated. This is the first male fly brain map, so it can be compared with existing female ones. The team identified cell types found only in one sex and others wired differently between sexes. Those neurons sit mainly in higher brain centres, while sensory and motor edges look alike. Differences still spread widely because the affected neurons connect differently across the system. Version 1.0 was released in June 2026, with data, images and browsing tools available for download. The dataset carries a CC-BY licence. The work involved the Cambridge Drosophila Connectomics Group and Google's connectomics group.
What changed
Only female fly connectomes and partial male datasets existed.
What it unlocks
Comparing wiring between male and female fly nervous systems at single-connection resolution.
- 262 sex-specific cell types
- 114 sexually dimorphic cell types
- 4.8% of central brain neurons
Sources