Published in Nature, the BANC connectome is a complete, synapse-level wiring map of the fruit fly’s central nervous system (brain + ventral nerve cord), enabling end-to-end circuit tracing from sensory inputs to motor outputs.
In a first, a large, international team led by multiple labs at Harvard Medical School and Princeton University has published a complete wiring diagram of all the connections between neurons in the central nervous system of an adult fruit fly.
hms.harvard.edu/news/researc...
However, they give us a better understanding of dominant circuit motifs that in turn can inform and inspire new theories / hypotheses for how they work, which, together with new experiments, will help us "understand" them better. [3/3]
I wouldn't claim that simulating = understanding. Besides that, we have made quite some progress in actually understanding what some C. elegans subcircuits are doing. But that required connectome + other data / experiments / theory. [1/3]
Not a GNT alumnus, but I hung out there for a year in 2007/2008 as a postdoc of Alex Pouget when he was there on sabbatical. It was a fun place to be!
We are excited to have been part of the community effort that led to the Brain-and-Nerve-Cord (BANC) connectome.
The Drugowitsch lab, in particular @zakiajabi.bsky.social, contributed an efficiently computable “influence score”—a scalable way to quantify effective distance and signal propagation in large neural networks. Code at doi.org/10.5281/zeno....