🏦 The BANC (said "the bank") 🏦 is the Brain And Nerve Cord, a GridTape transmission electron microscopy dataset of a female adult Drosophila melanogaster's central nervous system.

• The EM dataset was generated by Jasper Phelps and Minsu Kim in Wei-Chung Lee's lab at Harvard Medical School.
• 3D segmentation to extract the shapes of neurons and other objects in the dataset was performed by Zetta AI.
• Neuron proofreading was performed by a distributed community of academic researchers, citizen scientists, and image analysts from around the world, including the FlyWire Consortium and Aelysia.
• Annotation and analysis were spearheaded by Alex Bates and Helen Yang in Rachel Wilson's lab at Harvard Medical School.

Read more in our paper, published June 2026 in Nature: "Distributed control circuits across a brain-and-cord connectome" (direct pdf access link)

Generating the BANC connectome required 6 main phases that took around 1 year each:

• 2020: Sample preparation (read details)
• 2021: Serial sectioning and electron microscope imaging (read details)
• 2022: Image alignment
• 2023: Automated reconstruction of cells & synapses (read details)
• 2024: Proofreading and annotation (see FlyWire-BANC homepage)
• 2025: Analysis

• View the EM dataset and reconstructed neurons in neuroglancer: https://ng.banc.community/view
• Explore the connectome with FlyWire Codex: https://codex.flywire.ai/banc
• Browse and download connectome data files: gs://lee-lab_brain-and-nerve-cord-fly-connectome
• Access all paper-related files on Dataverse: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/8TFGGB

• Proofreading training materials
• Neuroglancer states for proofreading
• Annotations (cell types, etc.)
• banc‐bot user manual
• Join the FlyWire community to contribute yourself