A fruit fly brain may sound meaningless but there is a reason that Howard Hughes Medical Institute spent $40 million and 12 years to map it. And that reason is us.
The hemibrain connectome and its clock neuron circuity contains around 25,000 neurons, which can be grouped into thousands of distinct cell types spanning several brain regions and is the largest synaptic-level connectome ever created. It covers central fly brain circuits critical for associative learning and fly navigation.
This is not going to lead to any cures in the short term, of course. Fruit flies, mice, epidemiology, they can only ever be exploratory findings, but flies are essential basic research, waypoints on the road to applied science. Though animal studies can never show effects in humans, positive or negative, they can eliminate them, and in science that is a large chunk of the work.
