Welcome to Virtual Fly Brain

A hub for Drosophila melanogaster neural anatomy, imaging data & connectomics.

Because of recent changes to government funding, the NIH grant that supported FlyBase has been "terminated." They are now reaching out to the community for emergency funding. There are new firewalls for international funding. They therefore request that European labs contribute to the Cambridge, U.K. FlyBase group – European PI's received an email on how to contribute. They are working diligently to set up a mechanism to collect funds from U.S. and other labs; please check for the latest on FlyBase.org. In the meantime, if you are a non-European lab that would like to contribute to FlyBase, please send them an email to FlyBase help and they will contact you later. Thank you in advance for your support to keep FlyBase on air and continuing to serve the Drosophila research community.

Welcome to Virtual Fly Brain (VFB) - an interactive tool for neurobiologists to explore the detailed neuroanatomy, neuron connectivity and gene expression of Drosophila melanogaster. Our goal is to make it easier for researchers to find relevant anatomical information and reagents.

We integrate the neuroanatomical and expression data from the published literature, as well as image datasets onto the same brain template, making it possible to run cross searches, find similar neurons and compare image data on our 3D Viewer.

Explore Connectomes!

New Circuit Browser Tool has been made available for user testing.

We always welcome user feedback

Contributions welcome!

We do a Pull Request contributions workflow on GitHub. New users are always welcome!

See the latest VFB news

For announcement of latest features etc.

Quickstart guide for VFB

VFB integrates data curated from the literature with image data from many bulk sources.
The search system () allows you to search for neurons and neuroanatomical structures using almost any name found in the literature.
The query system () can identify neurons innervating any specified neuropil or fasciculating with any specified tract.
It also allows queries for genes, transgenes and phenotypes expressed in any brain region or neuron.
Search and query results combine referenced textual descriptions with 3D images and links to originating data sources.
VFB features tens of thousands of 3D images of neurons, clones and expression patterns, registered to standard template brains.
Any combination of these images can be viewed together.
You can hover () to explore brain regions in the Stack Viewer.
A BLAST-type query system (NBLAST) allows you to find similar neurons and drivers starting from a registered neuron.

Code with VFBconnect

Interact with VFB via Python!

Contributions welcome!

We do a Pull Request contributions workflow on GitHub. New users are always welcome!

Follow us on Bsky!

For announcement of latest features etc.