male Drosophila central nervous system · v1.0
waking up…
MUSCA is a live, in-browser map of the complete central nervous system of a male
Drosophila melanogaster — 166,700 neurons joined by 124 million synapses,
reconstructed from electron microscopy by HHMI Janelia, Google Research and collaborators
and released as male-cns:v1.0.
body-annotations.connectome-weights (segment-to-segment
synaptic counts, min confidence 0.5). The 25.6 M connections among annotated neurons are
pruned for legibility: edges below 6 synapses are dropped, and each neuron keeps only its
24 strongest outputs, leaving 2.8 M edges drawn here.syn-points.The cascade is a toy model. Real neurons have ion channels, inhibition, delays and adaptation; here activity is just a decaying, weight-scaled diffusion across an anatomical graph. It shows you where a signal can go, not what the fly actually computes. The "reverse" paths are the strongest anatomical routes, not verified physiological circuits. Nothing here is a claim about behaviour — it is a way to see the shape of a brain.
Dorkenwald, S., Matsliah, A., Sterling, A.R. et al.
Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous
system. Cell (2026). · Data: male-cns:v1.0, Janelia FlyEM, CC-BY 4.0.
Built as an independent visualisation. Not affiliated with Janelia, Google or the authors.