A whole fruit fly nervous system, alive in a world.
The brain floating over the bench is the complete central nervous system of an adult male Drosophila melanogaster: 164,587 neurons and 25.6 million connections from the MaleCNS v1.0 connectome (HHMI Janelia FlyEM, Google Research and the Cambridge connectomics group; Berg et al. 2026, Cell; CC-BY 4.0). Every neuron is a leaky integrate-and-fire unit stepped on the GPU, wired by the dataset's own synapse counts and transmitter predictions, and drawn where its cell body sits. A neuron lights up when it fires.
The fly on the floor is driven by that network. Its front feet on a food disc drive the tarsal taste neurons; when the proboscis motor neurons fire, the proboscis extends. Walk your avatar at it fast and the looming detectors fire; a giant-fibre burst makes it jump. Its leg motor neurons walk it, DNa01/DNa02 turn it, the wing power-muscle motor neurons beat its wings.
The Fruit Fly Lab window is the bench: stimulate, silence, restore or read out any set of neurons by cell type, class, superclass or side; tune the synaptic gain and connection threshold; watch every readout as a live rate and trace.
Put the fly in your world
Everything is one package, fruitFly: install it from ZeroMind and add a FruitFlyBrain, a FruitFly, a FoodPatch or two and a FruitFlyLab to your scene. The package README and its experiments guide (guides { path = "experiments" }) cover the model, the wiring and the experiments it was built for: taste to the proboscis, gain recovery, looming and escape, ablations, and standing a second connectome next to this one.
Data: MaleCNS v1.0, https://male-cns.janelia.org/, CC-BY 4.0. Model constants: Shiu et al. 2024, Nature.
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