MCNS — Modular Computational Neural System of a FruitFly

MCNS (Modular Computational Neural System) is my attempt to build a computational “brain” of a fruit fly from real connectome data. I’m using Janelia FlyEM’s MaleCNS dataset — neuron skeletons, synapses, connectivity, neurotransmitters, and other biological data — as the foundation for a digital fly.

The biggest challenge is scale: hundreds of thousands of neuron morphology files and massive biological datasets have to be downloaded, validated, organized, and transformed without losing their biological meaning.

I’m proud that MCNS is being built as a real data-driven system rather than a simulated concept. The long-term goal is to turn the reconstructed neural architecture into something computationally explorable and eventually capable of modeling aspects of fly neural behavior.

The project is still actively under development, so the GitHub repository is the best way to follow and test what exists so far.