Brain state locks silent memories in a trained fly connectome

Complete connectomes now exist for insect nervous systems, but whether a fixed wiring diagram can learn, and what its memories consist of, is unknown. Here, we trained a spiking model of the whole male Drosophila central nervous system, 167,106 neurons with fixed wiring, to plan moves and to remember a visual cue. Spikes write the cue into neuronal adaptation, which holds it silently until the next input reads it out. Cells that hold the trace are enriched for transcripts of a calcium-activated potassium channel in fly cell atlases. The learned readout recalls the trace only in the brain state of learning: the same trace evokes a different response at another delay, and a disease-like loss of potassium current rewrites the trace and changes how it is read. Learning in the new state is spared. Memory failure can arise from a change of state rather than a loss of storage.

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Publication Details

Journal
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Published
2026-10-29
DOI
https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.10.24.761586
Primary Topic
Neurobiology and Insect Physiology Research
Type
preprint

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preprint

Brain state locks silent memories in a trained fly connectome

Joe Poh Sheng YEONG, Ruoyun He, Chunjie Tian, Huikuan Chen et al.
3 links
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Neurobiology and Insect Physiology Research
preprint

Brain state locks silent memories in a trained fly connectome

Joe Poh Sheng YEONG, Ruoyun He, Chunjie Tian, Huikuan Chen, Junfeng Hao, Ting Liu, Han Wang, Lingpin Pang, Yunhua Zhao, Hongyu Ning, Yao Cai, Ye Tian, Yue Xu, Xuanhe Hou, Weibang Chen, Zizhong Yu, Xiaoyu Liu, Danxian Jiang, Yuhui Zhao, Huafeng Liu
preprint en

Abstract

Complete connectomes now exist for insect nervous systems, but whether a fixed wiring diagram can learn, and what its memories consist of, is unknown. Here, we trained a spiking model of the whole male Drosophila central nervous system, 167,106 neurons with fixed wiring, to plan moves and to remember a visual cue. Spikes write the cue into neuronal adaptation, which holds it silently until the next input reads it out. Cells that hold the trace are enriched for transcripts of a calcium-activated potassium channel in fly cell atlases. The learned readout recalls the trace only in the brain state of learning: the same trace evokes a different response at another delay, and a disease-like loss of potassium current rewrites the trace and changes how it is read. Learning in the new state is spared. Memory failure can arise from a change of state rather than a loss of storage.

bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Agency for Science, Technology and Research (SG), Guangdong Medical College (CN), Singapore General Hospital (SG), Shanghai Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital (CN), Affiliated Hospital of Guangdong Medical College Hospital (CN), Maastro Clinic (NL), Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (SG), China Medical University (CN)
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Neurobiology and Insect Physiology Research
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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