Fly Brain HubLarval Drosophila Brain Connectome (Winding et al. 2023)
University of Cambridge (Michael Winding et al.)
Complete synaptic wiring diagram of an entire insect brain, reconstructed from a first-instar Drosophila larva and published in Science in March 2023 by a team led by Michael Winding (University of Cambridge). It comprises 3,016 neurons and about 548,000 synapses, and the analysis highlighted heavy multisensory integration, interhemispheric crosstalk and recurrent circuit motifs.
Sources checked
Every fact above was read from these pages on the date the entry was added.
- ebi.ac.uk https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/search?query=DOI:10.1126/science.add9330&format=json&resultType=core
- en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_connectome
Used by: 5 projects
wetware
Roxx0x
Uses the larval fruit fly connectome of Winding et al. 2023, 2,952 neurons and about 110,000 connections, as a fixed reservoir. The wiring is never modified, because you cannot edit an animal's connectome; only a one-layer linear readout is trained on the activity it produces. On handwritten digits that readout reaches 94 per cent against a 10 per cent baseline. It installs with pip, downloads the connectome once and exposes digit and time-series tasks behind a small API.
connectome_data_prep
Yijie Yin, University of Cambridge
Yijie Yin's (Cambridge) notebooks and scripts for turning raw connectome releases into analysis-ready sparse connectivity matrices and metadata tables, with axon/dendrite splitting via flow centrality. It covers the adult male CNS, BANC, FlyWire/FAFB, hemibrain and MANC as well as the larval connectome, and includes benchmarking code for the pathfinding and effective-connectivity analyses used in the Connectome Interpreter framework. No license file is present.
CHIMERA (larval connectome in MuJoCo)
caparison1234
A Python project that runs 1,373 neurons and 22,400 synapses from the Winding et al. 2023 larval Drosophila connectome as LIF units and lets them drive a real-time MuJoCo larva body. Note the front end: a small Qwen2.5 0.5B language model converts typed text (English, Korean, Japanese or Chinese) into sensory drive, so 'danger' activates nociceptors and produces retreat or curling, and 'food smell' produces head scanning; the connectome itself is not perceiving anything. All 17 commits date from 2026-03-21, well before the September wave; no license is stated.
Virtual Fly Brain
Virtual Fly Brain consortium (UK institutions incl. MRC HGU)
A long-running UK-funded web atlas that registers neuron images, gene-expression patterns and connectomics onto standard Drosophila brain templates and links them through an anatomy ontology, so anatomy, expression and connectivity can be cross-searched in one place. Supported since 2009, it now indexes over 600,000 3D images and roughly 490,000 neurons with connectivity, spanning hemibrain, FlyWire, FANC and the larval L1EM data. The v2 front end (geppetto-vfb) is an MIT-licensed customisation of the Geppetto platform.
Wikipedia: Drosophila connectome
Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation)
Community-written encyclopedia article that serves as a one-stop overview of fruit fly connectomics, explaining why Drosophila is used as a model and walking through the major datasets from the 3,016-neuron larval brain to the adult hemibrain, FlyWire, the FANC and MANC nerve cords, and the 2025 whole-CNS BANC and male CNS reconstructions. It also touches on how wiring structure relates to behavior. Text is under CC BY-SA 4.0; last edited August 11, 2026.