BANC renderings

Renderings from the first adult fly connectome to unite the brain and the ventral nerve cord.

Distributed control circuits across a brain-and-cord connectome Bates, Phelps, Kim, Yang, Matsliah, Ajabi, Perlman and colleagues including Sterling, Seung, Murthy, Drugowitsch, Wilson, Lee · Nature, 2026 · doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10735-w
The dataset is public at flywire.ai.

188,000neurons

199Msynapses

3,832cross the neck

1whole nervous system

What the study found

Effector cells, the motor neurons and endocrine cells and the neurons reaching the viscera, are driven mostly by sensory cells in the same body part. Each body part therefore runs a local feedback loop of its own. Those loops are tied together by the ascending and descending neurons that cross the neck, and a single one of those cells is often positioned to influence several body parts at once, along with the endocrine cells that support the movement. Regions of the brain used for learning and navigation supervise the whole arrangement.

One descending neuron, many body parts

A single descending neuron in white, threading down from the brain into 131 motor neurons coloured by the body part each one serves — One descending neuron, in white, and the 131 motor neurons it contacts, each coloured by the body part it innervates: 41 front leg, 40 hind leg, 32 middle leg, 8 neck, 3 wing, and 7 whose target is not yet annotated. They stack in anatomical order down the nerve cord. 121 of the 124 labelled targets are on the left side of the body alone.