BANC — Drosophila central nervous system connectome (~135k neurons) 3D

BANC ("Brain And Nerve Cord") is a complete connectome of an adult FEMALE Drosophila melanogaster central nervous system — brain + ventral nerve cord in one specimen (~160,000 neurons, ~214M synapses) — imaged by GridTape transmission electron microscopy (Phelps & Kim, Wei-Chung Allen Lee lab, Harvard), segmented by Zetta.ai, and proofread by the BANC-FlyWire community (Bates, Phelps, Kim, Yang et al. 2026). This scene is the WHOLE connectome: 134,942 neurons across every neuronal super class with a published mesh — the optic-lobe intrinsic neurons, central-brain intrinsic neurons, ventral-nerve-cord intrinsic neurons, the descending/ascending bridge between brain and VNC, the sensory and motor periphery, and the visual projection/centrifugal systems. Each neuron is a meshopt-q14-compressed 3D-Tiles surface tagged with the BANC annotations: super class, region (central brain vs ventral nerve cord), cell type, side, predicted neurotransmitter, hemilineage, the sexual-dimorphism call, and cross-dataset cell-type matches (MaleCNS, MANC, hemibrain, FlyWire). Each neuron is colored individually; switch "Color By" to Super Class, Region, Predicted NT, or Dimorphism to read the organization. At ~135k neurons it is a dense whole-CNS volume — use the viewer's filter / Force-Zoom coarse LOD to explore regions and subsets.

Metadata

features	134,942 meshes
zoom	0–4
tiles	1,412

Provenance & reproducibility

Source: https://banc.community
License: CC BY-NC 4.0
Cite: Bates AS, Phelps JS, Kim M, Yang HH, et al. & the BANC-FlyWire Consortium. Distributed control circuits across a brain-and-cord connectome. Nature (2026) doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10735-w (preprint: bioRxiv 2025.07.31.667571). EM substrate by Phelps & Kim (Wei-Chung Allen Lee lab, Harvard); segmentation by Zetta.ai. BANC v888 public snapshot, CC BY-NC 4.0.

download_banc.py --download --tile --select all-neurons --max-neurons 200000 --decimate-faces 300000 --max-zoom 4 --compression meshopt-q14 (134,942 of 146,769 classified neurons; the rest lack a published mesh in the bucket. Meshes via cloud-volume from the anonymous public bucket precomputed://gs://lee-lab_brain-and-nerve-cord-fly-connectome/neuron_meshes — legacy single-resolution full-res meshes quadric-decimated in-worker to ~300k faces; annotations from the token-free compiled_data/banc_888/banc_888_meta.feather; selection = every neuronal super_class, excluding glia/trachea/not_a_neuron/unclassified; u16-quantized meshopt GLB 3D-Tiles octree)
muDM: neuron surfaces → TIN tiles; per-neuron color by root_id (hash); tags from the BANC v888 annotations: cell_type, super_class, region (central_brain/ventral_nerve_cord), cell_class, cell_sub_class, flow, side, hemilineage, nerve, predicted_nt (+consensus_nt), dimorphism, and cross-dataset matches malecns_type / manc_type / hemibrain_type / flywire_type

Programmatic access

3D Tiles entry point:

https://ngrf.mudm.io/tiles/banc/tileset.json

Machine descriptors: tilejson.json · croissant.json · full access guide