Visualizing FlyWire
A 3D explorer of the FlyWire fruit fly connectome.
Stack
- DuckDB
- FlyWire
- PyArrow
- scikit-learn
- three.js
- TypeScript
- UMAP
- Vite
Explained
FlyWire mapped every neuron in the adult fruit fly brain and their connections. This visualizer shows all 139,248 of them on screen at once.
Six layouts:
- ‘Anatomical’ / ‘Soma’ / ‘Mirrored’ are different views into neuron location.
- ‘Flattened’ / ‘Partners’ / ‘Sensory → Motor’ are different views into connectivity mappings.
Connection matrix shows the amount of synapses between groups. Click a neuron to light up the strongest inputs as rings and the outputs as solid discs.
Using this visualizer as a resource to fuel agent decision-making for inference-based projects using a fly brain.
The data is FlyWire’s FAFB 783 release, from Dorkenwald et al. and Schlegel et al. (Nature, 2024), shared under CC BY-NC 4.0.