New research reveals that sugar metabolism in brain cells may be a crucial defense against Alzheimer’s and related dementias.

For Drosophila, an international research consortium has recently published a map of all connections between all neurons in the fly brain—the so-called connectome.

Firstly, the anatomy of the brain and other major organs in the fly is very different from that of humans. ... Drosophila as a Model Organism. News-Medical, viewed 29 June 2025, ...

Serial section electron microscopy volume revealing the Drosophila brain structure. Image Credits: Michael Winding. The result is the model you see, looking like a slug wearing a clown wig ...

A team of Drosophila experts and enthusiasts inspected the map and corrected its errors. It took more than a decade for the scientists to produce the first high-resolution model of the fly brain.

Research uncovered how glycogen metabolism in neurons impacts neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. Disruption in this ...

“FlyWire,” a Princeton-led team of scientists and citizen scientists, has now made a massive step toward understanding the human brain by building a neuron-by-neuron and synapse-by-synapse roadmap — ...

More information: Neural circuit mechanisms underlying context-specific halting in Drosophila, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07854-7 Provided by Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience ...

Drosophila brain with presenilin deficits and rescued brain (IMAGE) ... Top: A fly with deficits in the presenilin gene—a model for Alzheimer’s disease—with high levels of cell death.

Compared to the human brain, a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) brain is positively miniscule, not only in sheer volume, but also with a mere 140,000 or so neurons and 50 million synapses.

Together, the team has now used this brain connectome to find all the neurons that make up the circadian clock of a fly. The result: "The circadian clock in the Drosophila brain consists of at ...