FRUIT FLIES are smart. For many years the race to assemble an adult fly connectome seemed likely to be won by the FlyEM project at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus, in Virginia. In 2020 FlyEM’s researchers, led by Gerry Rubin, a veteran fly biologist, published a connectome of an adult fruit-fly “hemibrain”, a set of 27,000 neurons …
