New paper: Distributed control circuits across a brain-and-cord connectome

Published in Nature, the Drosophila Brain-and-Nerve-Cord (BANC) connectome is a complete, synapse-level map of neural wiring across the fruit fly’s central nervous system (brain plus ventral nerve cord). By reconstructing neurons and every synaptic connection at single-synapse resolution, this connectome makes it possible to trace circuits end-to-end - from sensory inputs through intermediate processing to motor outputs-providing - a powerful foundation for studying how nervous systems generate behavior.

Creating the BANC connectome and releasing the associated datasets was a major community effort, led by Harvard Medical School together with the FlyWire team based at Princeton, with contributions from more than 100 authors.

The Drugowitsch Lab contributed by developing an efficiently computable influence score (code available), a scalable way to quantify effective distance and signal propagation in large neural networks. Using this approach, we identified hierarchical control circuits built from local sensorimotor loops.

Quick overview:
HMS News
Bluesky thread by Wei-Chung Lee and Alex Bates

All the details:
The paper