DROSOPHILA / BRAIN ATLAS

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Schematic model · Not measured anatomy

Small brain. A world of possibilities.

A tiny brain. An enormous world to explore.

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Discover the datasets, simulations, tools, and playful experiments built around the fruit-fly brain. A source-checked directory for researchers, makers, and the simply curious.

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From the first wiring diagram to the next playful experiment.

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Tools & Libraries

flybench

brandoncho369

A reflex benchmark that asks the question the demo wave mostly skips: does the simulated fly still do the things a real fly is known to do? It ships a suite of behavioural tasks with literature citations, a reference leaky integrate-and-fire simulator and a scoring harness, so any set of model parameters gets a comparable number. The framing is direct about why it exists, that every Minecraft or Doom demo had to guess at synaptic weight, global gain and inhibition and then hand-tune until something looked alive.

Demos & Games

NeuroCraft Fly

Evan Sinclair Smith (@evnsnclr), Georgia Institute of Technology

A Minecraft fly driven by the full retained MaleCNS graph: 166,700 neurons and 25,582,938 directed edges, with six declared in-game inputs (player approach, nearby mobs, brushing, attack attempts, food, light) feeding the model and hand-chosen readouts selecting scripted body programs. The repository is currently a landing page and roadmap: the recorded demo exists, but the Fabric mod and companion source have not been published yet. The README is explicit that this shows a visible, testable mapping, not recovered fly physiology.

Datasets & Connectomes

BANC (Brain And Nerve Cord)

Harvard Medical School (Lee & Wilson labs), Princeton University (Murthy lab), Harvard (Drugowitsch lab)

Connectome of a single adult female fruit fly imaged at 4 nm by serial-section EM, covering her brain and ventral nerve cord together at synapse resolution, which no earlier dataset had managed in one animal. The README reports about 188,000 neurons and 199 million predicted synapses; the analysis code (mostly R) and the Dataverse data are both released under CC BY 4.0. The paper by Bates, Phelps, Kim, Yang and colleagues was published open access in Nature in 2026.

CC-BY-4.0★ 13
Demos & Games

DesktopFly

DenisSergeevitch

A 3D fruit fly living on the macOS desktop (Electron port for Windows), driven by a 1 kHz leaky integrate-and-fire simulation of two real circuits: a 668-neuron FlyWire subset for sensing, escape and decisions, and a 1,045-neuron MaleCNS descending-to-leg pathway ending in 220 motor neurons. Window edges act as terrain, window moves as threats and clicks as vibrations, and a separate window shows 23,210 neuron positions spiking live. The README is upfront that muscle mechanics are modeled rather than biologically calibrated; code is MIT, FlyWire data CC BY-NC 4.0 and MaleCNS CC BY 4.0.

Demos & Games

DOOMFLY

nftechie (Alex Wormuth)

A MaleCNS v1.0 spiking simulation wired to a live Doom arena: each frame stimulates visual input neurons, activity propagates through 166,700 neurons, and motor output is decoded into movement and firing. The README is candid that learned survival has not been demonstrated yet.

Simulation & Emulation

Eon fly-brain

Eon Systems PBC

Eon Systems' open re-implementation of the Shiu et al. (Nature 2024) leaky integrate-and-fire whole-brain model, covering roughly 138,000 FlyWire v783 neurons and 5 million synapses and runnable on Brian2 (CPU/CUDA), PyTorch, NEST GPU and GeNN backends so users can stimulate or silence any population and watch activity propagate. In a March 10, 2026 update the company reported coupling this brain to a NeuroMechFly v2 body in MuJoCo, describing grooming, feeding and foraging behaviours emerging from the closed sensorimotor loop, which it calls the first embodied fly upload.

Demos & Games

Fly Brain Minecraft

blendi-remade

A Fabric mod for Minecraft 1.21.1 that runs the full neuPrint male-cns v1.0 connectome (about 176k neurons, 6.29M connections at 5+ synapses) as leaky integrate-and-fire units inside a fly mob, one thread per fly. In-game visual, smell, taste and touch stimuli feed sensory neurons, and decoded motor channels drive feeding, grooming, escape jumps, walking and flight. Includes a live brain-activity view, a HUD of population firing rates, and 56 JUnit tests; code is MIT, connectome data CC BY 4.0.

Body Models & Physics

flybody

Google DeepMind / HHMI Janelia (Turaga Lab)

An anatomically detailed fruit-fly body for the MuJoCo physics engine, with articulated legs, wings, leg adhesion and ready-made reinforcement learning tasks for walking imitation, free flight and vision-guided flight. Published in Nature in 2025 and released under Apache-2.0.

Apache-2.0★ 929
Datasets & Connectomes

FlyWire (FAFB v783)

Princeton University (Murthy & Seung labs) with the FlyWire consortium

Whole-brain connectome of an adult female fruit fly, built by AI segmentation of the FAFB electron-microscopy volume followed by community proofreading led from Princeton. Version 783, served through the Codex explorer, holds 139,255 proofread neurons and tens of millions of synapses with neurotransmitter predictions. The flagship paper (Dorkenwald et al.) appeared in Nature in 2024 alongside companion annotation papers.

CC-BY-NC-4.0
Datasets & Connectomes

Larval Drosophila Brain Connectome (Winding et al. 2023)

University of Cambridge (Michael Winding et al.)

Complete synaptic wiring diagram of an entire insect brain, reconstructed from a first-instar Drosophila larva and published in Science in March 2023 by a team led by Michael Winding (University of Cambridge). It comprises 3,016 neurons and about 548,000 synapses, and the analysis highlighted heavy multisensory integration, interhemispheric crosstalk and recurrent circuit motifs.

CC-BY-4.0
Datasets & Connectomes

MaleCNS v1.0

HHMI Janelia FlyEM / University of Cambridge / MRC LMB / Google Research

A complete wiring diagram of an adult male fruit fly’s central nervous system, combining the brain, optic lobes and ventral nerve cord with more than 166,000 neurons. The CC-BY dataset reached v1.0 on 2026-06-08; the Cell paper was published on 2026-09-03. These are separate release events.

CC-BY-4.0
Tools & Libraries

NAVis

navis-org (Fly Connectomics group, Cambridge)

A general-purpose Python library for handling neuron skeletons, meshes, dotprops and image volumes, with 2D/3D plotting, morphometrics, NBLAST similarity and template-brain transforms built in. Developed in the Cambridge fly connectomics community as the Python counterpart of the R natverse, it plugs into neuPrint and, through the fafbseg extension, FlyWire/FAFB. Performance-critical pieces have been moved to Rust via navis-fastcore.

Body Models & Physics

NeuroMechFly / FlyGym

Neuroengineering Laboratory (NeLy), EPFL

EPFL's digital twin of the adult fruit fly: a micro-CT-derived biomechanical body simulated in MuJoCo with compound-eye vision, olfaction, leg adhesion, mechanosensory feedback and a hierarchical brain/VNC control architecture. NeuroMechFly v2 was published in Nature Methods in November 2024 (Wang-Chen, Ramdya et al.), and the FlyGym 2.0 rewrite released in April 2026 brought roughly 10x faster CPU simulation and about 300x faster GPU simulation via Warp/MJWarp. It is the body used by the Eon and Rojas embodied whole-brain projects.

Apache-2.0★ 365

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Demos & Games

Fly Brain Tetris

alexeygrigorev (@alexeygrigorev)

A Brick Game handheld in the browser where a fly works the buttons, with a second panel showing responses of a simplified linear model derived from the FAFB v783 connectome. Only a 32-channel readout learns, fitted by cross-entropy optimisation over 24 generations with 64 candidates, four games each and ten elites; the compiled 32x6 transform stays fixed. That transform, its pseudoinverse, the neuron IDs and the graph provenance are committed as JSON and pinned by SHA-256. The overview ends by saying what it is not: an artificial policy over engineered board features.

Simulation & Emulation

fly-distill

michelangeloromerochisco (@michelangeloromerochisco)

A controlled study that freezes the larval Drosophila connectome of Winding et al. 2023 (2,952 neurons, 38,401 edges at the three-synapse threshold) as the recurrent substrate of a byte-level language model, against degree-preserving shuffles, Erdos-Renyi graphs, weight erasure and a hub-capping arm. Decision rules were written before the data, four seeds ran to 150M training bytes, and the whole thing fits in roughly 277 GPU-hours on one 4 GB laptop GPU. The paper title carries the finding: at this scale, hub concentration masks the benefit of the biological wiring.

Simulation & Emulation

Fly Garden

carsonshicks2016-beep (@carsonshicks2016-beep)

A local 3D arena for one fly that persists between sessions, its brain the full FlyWire v783 import (138,639 neurons, 54,492,922 represented synapses, no threshold and no reduced substitute) run in Brian2 on a NeuroMechFly 2.1 body at a 100 microsecond physics step. The boundaries section is why to read it: odour-guided action selection is not established, the gait generator and escape reflex are engineered, and learning is explicitly not demonstrated. A staged report records 60 full-brain trials against 40 physical controls where the away-directed criterion failed and DNp09 stayed silent.

Demos & Games

Fly Poker

EvanGruhlkey (@EvanGruhlkey)

Heads-up no-limit Hold em against a fly in a full-screen casino: both sides start at 100 big blinds, blinds are 0.5 and 1, stacks carry between hands and the button alternates. The opponent is a network derived from the checksum-pinned FlyWire graph, trained on a rented L4 by first copying an equity teacher and then by self-play, running locally in a browser worker. Raw connectome tables and weights are kept out of git, the FlyWire terms (CC BY-NC 4.0) are stated as separate from the MIT reference code, and the MaleCNS manifest is flagged as carrying an unresolved checksum.

Simulation & Emulation

FlyBrainLab (Agentic Scientific Discovery)

JonasMayerDev (@JonasMayerDev)

A hackathon entry for the Databricks "Agentic Scientific Discovery" challenge (Munich, October 2026) that hands an LLM agent team the experiment loop: plan a test on the DNg02 descending neurons, run sham, stimulation and disconnection arms over seeds 42 to 44 on the full FAFB FlyWire v783 graph (138,639 neurons, 15,091,983 processed connection rows) with pinned Shiu et al. code in Brian2, then pick the next test from the outcome. Parameters and targets were sealed beforehand, and the README states that an existing RL policy holds the body up in the 200 ms window tested.

Simulation & Emulation

Synaptera

omeruk (@omeruk)

A whole-brain leaky integrate-and-fire model of the FlyWire v783 connectome (138,639 neurons, 54,492,922 synapses, Brian2) flown in closed loop on a NeuroMechFly/FlyGym MuJoCo body, against criteria committed before the runs they decide. The conclusion stays narrow: the only behavioural decision coming from the connectome is feeding, read out as MN9 above 10 Hz, and its trigger is a hand-made shortcut because the leg sugar neurons chosen by connectivity leave MN9 at 0 Hz. DNp15 failed its own validation, DNg02 never spiked, and no brain-only run landed.

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