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Interactive neuroanatomy

Explore a Fruit Fly Brain

Select an established function and rotate the adult Drosophila melanogaster brain to see the associated anatomy highlighted.

This is an educational anatomy explorer, not a whole-brain simulation. The glow is illustrative. It does not represent measured neural activity, a complete causal pathway, emotion, or consciousness.
1 Choose a function 2 Rotate the brain 3 Read the evidence
JFRC2 adult fly brain atlas Real atlas geometry
Interactive
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Swipe left or right to rotate while vertical swipes keep scrolling the page. Use the controls below for rotation and zoom. Keyboard: arrows rotate, + / - zoom, R resets, Space pauses the illustrative glow.

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Vision selected. Optic lobe highlighted.
Optic lobe

Vision

The optic lobes contain layered visual neuropils that transform signals arriving from the compound eyes. This broad highlight marks the optic-lobe system, not one single visual computation.

Research reference Takemura et al. (2017), eLife Connectomic analysis of a Drosophila motion-detection circuit.
What you are looking at

A map of anatomy, not a map of thoughts

The base shape and highlighted regions come from the JFRC2 adult fly brain atlas and BrainName neuropil domains distributed by Virtual Fly Brain. WIC uses reduced copies of those published surfaces so the explorer can run locally in the browser without a backend.

Functions do not live in one isolated spot. Vision, smell, navigation, feeding, memory, and sleep each depend on circuits that cross multiple regions. The highlighted region is therefore the clearest established anatomical anchor for the selected function, not a claim that the rest of the brain is inactive.

Front end onlyNo account, server simulation, or live connectome API.
Real atlas surfacesReduced from Virtual Fly Brain JFRC2 / BrainName meshes.
Illustrative animationThe pulsing glow is a visual aid, not experimental activity data.
Broad functional mappingEach selection links to a primary research reference.
Anatomy provenance

Source and attribution

The anatomical surfaces are reduced from the Virtual Fly Brain Drosophila adult brain template JFRC2 and BrainName painted domains dataset. BrainName domain meshes are distributed under CC BY 4.0. The underlying JFRC2 template comes from FlyLight work by Jenett and colleagues.

Virtual Fly Brain dataset Jenett et al. 2012 Ito et al. 2014 FlyWire Codex

The current WIC visual uses JFRC2 atlas geometry for compact browser rendering. FlyWire is linked as a modern whole-brain connectome resource, but its reconstructed neurons are not being represented by the atlas mesh shown here.