Virtual fruit fly brains can play Doom and trade bitcoin

When scientists revealed the first in-depth map of a male fruit fly’s brain and nervous system—its connectome—in early September, neuroscience researchers rejoiced. Fruit flies are a key animal model, and studying their brains can help illuminate pathways and functions our species share.

Then the chronically online got hold of it. With access to the public dataset for the atlas, people soon set the “fly” to work in various virtual environments—from the video game Doom to bitcoin trading sites.

“It’s certainly an unexpected application of producing a connectome, but it’s fun, and it puts a spotlight on the research and allows the general public to get an entry into an otherwise complicated and difficult topic,” says Gerald M. Rubin, head of biology at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia and one of the researchers behind the dataset.

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This connectome, which includes more than 166,000 neurons’ shapes and sizes, as well as the connections among them, is the fourth extensive map of its kind in flies and builds on two decades of study aimed at understanding how brains work. Researchers say this dataset, the first from a male fruit fly, is particularly intriguing for analyzing brain similarities and differences between sexes.