Scientists have created the first detailed wiring diagram of an insect brain.

The brain, from a fruit fly larva, contained 3016 neurons connected by 548,000 synapses, the team reported Thursday in the journal Science.

Previous wiring diagrams, known as connectomes, were limited to worms and tadpoles with just a few hundred neurons and a few thousand synaptic connections.

The fruit fly larva connectome is an important advance because it's "closer in many regards to a human brain than the other ones," says Joshua Vogelstein, an author of the study and an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

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