Special Seminar with Srini Turaga
Description
Srini Turaga, HHMI Janelia Research Campus
Talk Title: Simulating the brain and body of the fruit fly
Talk Abstract: We now have connectomes of the entire fruit fly nervous system at single neuron resolution. How do we translate these new measurements into an understanding of how the brain processes sensory information and produces behavior? I will describe two computational efforts to model the brain and the body of the fruit fly. First, I will describe a new modeling method which makes highly accurate predictions of neural activity in the fly visual system as measured in the living brain, using only measurements of its connectivity from a dead brain [1], joint work with Jakob Macke. Second, I will describe a new whole body physics simulation of the fruit fly which can accurately reproduce its locomotion behaviors, both flight and walking [2], joint work with Google DeepMind. Together, these methods and models point the way towards a whole animal simulation of the fruit fly capable of predicting the neural circuit mechanisms underlying all fly behavior.
[1] Lappalainen JK, Tschopp FD, Prakhya S, McGill M, Nern A, Shinomiya K, Takemura Sy, Gruntman E, Macke JH, and Turaga SC. Connectome-constrained networks predict neural activity across the fly visual system. Nature, 2024.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07939-3
[2] Vaxenburg R, Siwanowicz I, Merel J, Robie AA, Morrow C, Novati G, Stefanidi Z, Card GM, Reiser MB, Botvinick MM, Branson KM, Tassa† Y, and Turaga† SC. Whole-body simulation of realistic fruit fly locomotion with deep reinforcement learning. Nature, 2025.