Dataset · 2023
MANC — male adult nerve cord
A dense connectome of the male fly ventral nerve cord, and the counterpart to FANC — the pair is the field's best evidence on how much of a connectome is sex-specific rather than species-typical.
| Species | Drosophila melanogaster (male) |
|---|---|
| Region | Ventral nerve cord |
| Modality | FIB-SEM, dense reconstruction |
| Access | Open; neuPrint |
| Status | Released |
MANC extends the hemibrain team’s dense-reconstruction approach from the central brain to the ventral nerve cord of a male fly, mapping circuits all the way to motor neurons.
What it is good for. Comparison. Having both a male and a female VNC reconstruction — MANC and FANC — makes it possible to ask which connections differ between individuals, which differ between sexes, and which are invariant. Almost no other part of connectomics can separate those three yet.
What it does not support. Treating either animal as canonical. The comparison is the finding; a claim from one of them alone inherits the n = 1 problem that runs through this whole catalogue.
A note on numbers. This record deliberately carries no neuron or synapse count. The published figures exist, but not in a source this catalogue has verified, and every other record here states where its numbers came from.
Where these numbers come from. Takemura et al. (2023) preprint 10.1101/2023.06.05.543757, later published in eLife. Neuron and synapse counts are deliberately omitted: the abstract in this project's corpus does not state them, and this catalogue does not carry numbers it cannot cite. DOI 10.1101/2023.06.05.543757.