Sensorimotor behaviour from an untrained brain-and-nerve-cord connectome
How to prepare an accurate paper press kit? Illustrated guide
John R. Minnick, Jesus Gonzalez-Ferrer, Jinghui Geng, Jason K. Eshraghian, Mohammed A. Mostajo-Radji, David Haussler et al. · arXiv: 2610.33881v1 · Summary page
Why cover this story this week?
A fly connectome takes its first steps
How much behaviour is already implicit in a nervous system’s wiring? A new preprint turns an adult fly’s mapped brain and nerve cord into a spiking network of 172,433 neurons, using untuned parameters from a published brain model. Connected to a simulated body through fixed sensory and motor rules, it navigated around obstacles to 95% of the odour sources. A rewired network preserving each neuron’s connection counts and signs reached 18%; replaying the original leg commands without sensory input reached almost none. The measured wiring mattered, but so did the continuous exchange between sensing and movement.
The model could also reverse odour approach into avoidance through dopamine-gated weakening of mushroom-body output synapses. That reversal required pairing, while making it odour-specific required scaling one class of olfactory synapses. This is not a demonstration that a wiring diagram explains an entire animal. It is a way to ask, pathway by pathway, which functions anatomy can support—and where missing biological details become consequential.
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