We provide the most detailed picture yet of the result of sexually dimorphic development of the nervous system. The dataset should be a game-changer for researchers exploring behaviour, circuits & brain wiring! Check out male-cns.janelia.org.

Huge thanks to our amazing team of co-authors! 10/10

Statistical analysis of connectivity within the central brain shows that around 6.5% of synaptic connections in the male and 1.3% of connections in the female are dimorphic. In the male, sex-specific circuit elements form highly interconnected clusters with similar connectivity. 9/10

We explore #dimorphism across sensory modalities (visual and auditory systems, gustation and olfaction) and find, for example, a putative functional “love spot” involving male-specific neurons. 8/10

Comparing the EM neurons to light microscopy datasets of fruitless and doublesex expression, we annotated the putative expression pattern of these genes for both the male and female connectomes. 7/10

We cross-matched neurons and identified over 7k isomorphic, 114 sexually dimorphic, 262 male- and 69 female-specific cell types. In total, these neurons make up 4.8% and 2.4% of the male and female brain, respectively. 6/10

As the first (and so far, only) male brain, we compared this connectome to the previously published #FlyWire #FAFB female dataset to investigate the structural differences across male and female brain connectomes. 5/10

Using these annotations we ran end-to-end analyses going from sensory inputs all the way to motor outputs. This showed, for instance, that ascending and descending neurons are not passive relays but likely perform complex transformations of information flowing between brain and nerve cord. 4/10

This is the first completely proofread connectome of a nervous system (brain + nerve cord) for an adult animal with complex behaviour: 167k neurons with rich annotations (classes, cell types, developmental lineages, …) to help explore the dataset and 125M synaptic connections between them. 3/10

A hugely successful collaboration between @janelia-flyem.bsky.social @camzoology.bsky.social @mrclmb.bsky.social with @beckett14.bsky.social @mmcosta.bsky.social Philipp Schlegel (not on Bluesky) and many others. Major funding from @wellcometrust.bsky.social and @hhmijanelia.bsky.social. 2/10

Such biophysically realistic network modeling provides the foundation for precise hypothesis-driven circuit manipulations, electrophysiology, and transcriptomic analysis in the future. So stay tuned😄(10/10)

Our anterior hindbrain circuit model, based on ground-truth connectivity, reproduces experimentally observed neural dynamics and predicts new mechanisms for flexible decision-making. (9/10)

Using 2P photo-activations and a ML classifier, we assigned functional labels to neurons based solely on morphology, enhancing our EM dataset. Our classifier also provides a basis to assign functional labels to other cell library resources for which calcium imaging had not been performed. (8/10)