Digital fruit fly brain model walks and cleans its feelers

"The researchers at Eon Systems have taken several pre-existing components: a fruit fly brain scan, a tool for modelling neurons, a model of some of the fly's muscles and body, and a very simple virtual environment, connected them together and ran it. The team claims that the result displays some of the behavior of the real insect."

"One part is a whole-brain connectome of a fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster - one of the classic laboratory organisms... Effectively, this is a 3D brain scan of a fly's brain, including 125,000 neurons and 50 million synapses."

"The connectome comes from the splendidly named Flywire effort. That was published in 2024, and the same year, a team demonstrated that it seemed to respond to some signals."

Eon Systems developed the first multi-behavior brain upload by integrating existing scientific components: a complete fruit fly brain connectome containing 125,000 neurons and 50 million synapses, neuron modeling tools, muscle and body models, and a simple virtual environment. The connectome derives from the Flywire project, mapping an adult female Drosophila melanogaster brain. By connecting these components and running simulations, researchers demonstrated that the digital brain produces behaviors resembling those of actual fruit flies. The work builds on substantial previous research published in reputable scientific journals, combining established neuroscience data with computational modeling to create a functional digital brain simulation.

Read at Theregister