Male fruit fly brain fully mapped for the first time
An international team co-led by the University of Cambridge has completed the first full wiring map of a male adult animal's brain and nerve cord, charting 166,700 neurons and millions of connections. The work, published in September 2026, builds on an earlier female fruit fly connectome by the same group, allowing scientists to directly compare male and female brains for the first time. The comparison revealed that neurons reroute identical sensory signals into sex-specific circuits, producing opposite behaviours: male flies respond to the smell of another male with aggression, female flies with courtship. The entire dataset is now freely available as a public research tool.
Neuroscientists and clinicians studying diseased brains now have a complete healthy reference to work from.
Source: Comparison of male and female fly brains is unlocking the secret workings of the mind (cam.ac.uk).
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