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.

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

“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 — ...

Stores of glucose in the brain could play a much more significant role in the pathological degeneration of neurons than ...

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 ...

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.

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

Janssens J, et al. Spatial transcriptomics in the adult Drosophila brain and body. eLife. 2025;13:RP92618. Jennings BH. Drosophila – a versatile model in biology & medicine. Mater Today.

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.

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.