Dataset · 2026
BANC — brain and nerve cord connectome
The first connectome to join a fly's brain and ventral nerve cord in one reconstruction, closing the gap that made descending and ascending neurons untraceable.
| Species | Drosophila melanogaster |
|---|---|
| Region | Brain and ventral nerve cord, united |
| Modality | Serial-section EM, dense reconstruction |
| Access | Open |
| Status | Released |
Every fly connectome before BANC stopped at a boundary: the brain datasets truncated descending neurons where they left the head, and the nerve-cord datasets truncated the same neurons where they arrived. BANC reconstructs both in one volume, so a descending neuron can be followed from the brain region that drives it to the motor circuit it reaches.
What it is good for. Anything that crosses the neck. The paper’s own finding depends on it: effector neurons are driven mostly by sensory neurons in the same body part, forming local feedback loops, and those loops are linked by long-range ascending and descending circuits organised into behaviour-centric modules, supervised by brain regions involved in learning and navigation. That is an architectural claim no single-region dataset could have supported.
What it does not support. Numbers this catalogue can cite. See the source note below.
Where these numbers come from. 'Distributed control circuits across a brain-and-cord connectome' (2026), Nature 10.1038/s41586-026-10735-w. Counts are omitted: the abstract gives an order of magnitude for the fly nervous system as a whole (~10⁸ synaptic connections), not a figure for this reconstruction. DOI 10.1038/s41586-026-10735-w.