أَعُوذُ بِاللّٰهِ مِنَ الشَّيْطَانِ الرَّجِيمِ

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

In the name of ALLAH, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

AI: Fruit Fly Brain Simulation

Artificial intelligence (AI) brings massive value by automating repetitive tasks, drastically reducing human error, and analyzing vast datasets in seconds. These capabilities drive round-the-clock productivity, faster decision-making, and personalized experiences, allowing businesses and individuals to save time and focus on creative, high-value work.

AI may act as a powerful assistant in medical science too. AI helps in reviewing massive datasets instantly. It helps doctors spot diseases earlier, speeds up the discovery of new drugs, and tailors treatments to individual patients. The most important field for AI will be the interventions in brain to help patients control problems caused by mental disorder. Eon Systems has taken a giant step in this regards.

Eon Systems created "the fruit fly simulation" ; which is a massive digital model that copies the brain and body of an adult fruit fly. By mapping ~ 130,000 neurons and 50 million connections, scientists created an "embodied brain". When placed in a virtual environment, the digital fly walks, flies, and cleans itself without prior AI training.

Eon Systems PBC is a San Francisco-based neurotechnology and biotechnology startup founded in 2024. The company's goal is to emulate human-scale intelligence by mapping biological brains and creating whole-brain digital replicas.The company is best known for its breakthrough in creating advanced digital brain emulations. The company created a detailed map of all the neural connections in a brain of a Fruit Fly.

Eon Systems employed a real-world technique, where physical brain tissue was expanded like a sponge. That made it easier to look at tiny brain cells under a microscope. Eon Systems uses these microscopic maps and artificial intelligence to build exact digital twins of biological brains. In late 2024, the team published landmark research in the journal Nature demonstrating the first fully emulated animal brain. They built a digital fruit fly brain that matched biological neural responses with 91% accuracy. Ultimately, their goal is to make human brain preservation and uploading available to individuals.

Earlier this year, Eon Systems PBC co-founder and founding advisor Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross shared some of the work that we’ve been doing on X, and we were pleasantly surprised at how much attention it received. This embodied fly is still very much a work-in-progress, and a first step towards showing how an embodied brain would control a virtual body. Dr Alex has explained the process on this link

https://eon.systems/updates/embodied-brain-emulation

"First, we want to acknowledge how much this project depends on the broader neuroscience community. Our work builds directly on the adult fly connectome (Dorkenwald et al., 2024), on connectome-constrained brain models (Lappalainen et al., 2024), on neuromechanical fly body models (Wang-Chen et al., 2024; Ozdil et al., 2024), and on decades of work mapping sensory circuits, descending neurons, and behavior in Drosophila. The current system is an integration effort, most specifically of existing brain models and existing virtual body models. We’d also like to state that this work was a true team effort conducted by Scott Harris, Aarav Sinha, Viktor Toth, Alexis Pomares, and Philip Shiu".

"Various sensory inputs were fed into the body model. For taste, we can activate gustatory receptor neurons corresponding to appetitive stimuli such as sugar, or aversive bitter neurons (Shiu et al., 2024; Tastekin et al., 2025). In our model, similar to the biological fly, taste inputs on the legs and proboscis, when activated in the NeuroMechFly body, result in activation of taste inputs of the brain. This causes feeding, turning, and slowing near appetitive food (Shiu et al., 2024; Sapkal et al., 2024; Scott, 2018). Olfaction can similarly be implemented by activating the appropriate olfactory receptor neurons."

"The fly body is not currently driven by the full downstream motor hierarchy of the biological fly. Instead, we use a small number of descending outputs as a practical interface between the connectome model and the biomechanics. In the fly, specific descending neurons are known to be involved in particular behaviors (Simpson, 2024)."

We've uploaded a fruit fly. We took the @FlyWireNews connectome of the fruit fly brain, applied a simple neuron model (@Philip_Shiu Nature 2024) and used it to control a MuJoCo physics-simulated body, closing the loop from neural activation to action.

It's crazy that this worked. The uploaded fly has 91% behavior accuracy with only 4 things:-

the graph of connections

the weights as determined by the number of synapses connecting those neurons

a map of excitatory and inhibitory neurons

leaky-integrate-and-fire

This shows how much information is captured by the architecture itself, rather than the neuron model, which is great for the feasibility of full emulation.

(Have a look at this link https://eon.systems/updates/weve-uploaded-a-fruit-fly

Scientists have taken the complete wiring of a real fruit fly's brain, rebuilt it inside a computer, plugged it into a virtual body, and watched it start moving on its own. No one programmed it how to walk. It simply knew.

This is being called the world's first embodied whole brain emulation. To understand why it is so remarkable, start with the map. Over years of painstaking work, researchers created the FlyWire connectome, a complete wiring diagram of an adult fruit fly's brain, charting all of its roughly 140,000 neurons and around 50 million connections between them. Think of it as the full circuit board of a living mind.

A team, building on that map, turned the static diagram into a working simulation. They modeled how signals flow through those neurons, then connected this digital brain to a physics based virtual fly body, complete with jointed legs and realistic movement. The result was a closed loop. Sensory information flows into the digital brain, activity ripples through the recreated neural circuitry, motor commands flow out, and the simulated body acts on them. Perception to action, running entirely in software.

And it worked. The virtual fly walks and grooms in ways that closely resemble the real insect, with the underlying model predicting the fly's behavior with around 95 percent accuracy. It behaves like a fly not because it was trained to, but because it inherited the fly's actual brain wiring.

Now the honest part. This is not a conscious insect trapped in a computer, and it is not proof we can upload minds. It is a functional recreation of a brain's structure, an extraordinary scientific tool, not a living soul in a box. The startup behind it, Eon Systems, next hopes to emulate a mouse brain, and dreams of eventually reaching human scale, though that remains a distant and deeply uncertain goal.

Still, watching a digital brain take its first steps is a genuinely historic moment. Does it fascinate you, or does the idea of one day emulating a human brain feel a little unsettling?

Source: Eon Systems, FlyWire connectome, Nature