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Fly feeding circuit: study, figures & replay

Fly feeding circuit

Does disconnecting Roundup, a circuit neuron, reduce activity in motor neuron MN9?

The circuit intervention

Selected model connections around Roundup and motor neuron MN9. Roundup's outgoing connections are marked as cut; its incoming connections remain.
Selected model connections; schematic layout. The experiment cuts all Roundup outputs; only selected links are shown. Incoming connections remain. This is wiring, not activity flow.

Fewer MN9 spikes in all 15 simulated pairs

Fifteen paired simulated MN9 spike counts at recurrent gains 0.8, 1.0 and 1.2. Each matched seed has fewer spikes after Roundup’s outgoing weights are zeroed.
MN9 motor-neuron spikes over one simulated second. Each line joins a matched input seed; five seeds at each connection strength.

Connection-strength study

I proposed and directed a study of whether removing Roundup’s outputs still reduces MN9 activity when connection strength changes.

In a 127,400-neuron implementation of a published fly model, setting Roundup’s outgoing weights to zero reduced MN9 spiking in all 15 paired comparisons: three connection strengths and five input seeds.

The result concerns one motor neuron and input regime in a computational model; it does not establish a change in real feeding behaviour.

Explore the circuit comparison
Methods & sources

Thirty one-second simulations compare Roundup’s outgoing connections kept or cut at three recurrent gains and five matched input seeds.

Within each seed, both conditions at all three gains shared candidate and accepted sensory inputs. A refractory-eligibility filter rejected some candidates; accepted inputs matched across these runs. The shared-input design and an execution correction were adopted after initial failures; the design was not preregistered.

The five seeds represent alternative model inputs, not animals. The comparison covers one neuron intervention, motor output and input regime. The source paper corrects left–right labels in its dataset; genetic-driver coverage and historical cell-ID lineage are not established here.

Shiu et al. (2024), source paper · Pinned source model

Download aggregate results (CSV) · Evidence and source hashes (JSON)

Network selection and sources · Original full results figure · Video and chart provenance · Separate body-replay source. The chart shows the 15 matched simulation pairs. The video covers −0.4 to 2.0 simulated seconds, using a separate motor archive and an illustrative movement mapping.

Explore the 3D fly

Replay simulated motor spikes alongside whole-fly and mouth views. Rotate the fly or step through the activity in the interactive replay. The recorded replay is illustrative movement from a separate simulation archive, not the paired comparison.

Play the recorded replay Explore the 3D replay

Input timing

Does timing change the effect of cutting more connections?

I proposed and directed a comparison of cutting only Roundup’s connection to MN9 with cutting all its outputs. Across five artificial input templates, shifted timing increased, decreased or left unchanged the difference between the cuts.

No consistent direction across these five templates. This is a simulation result from one fixed model and measurement window.

Explore the input-timing study
Separating neural signals: study preview

Separating neural signals

Can stimulus and choice be separated when errors are rare?

When stimulus and choice usually agree, can the analysis tell their signals apart? In this synthetic study, a component can be strongly labelled as choice-related while reconstructing the known choice signal poorly. With no error trials, stimulus and choice cannot be separated by this fit.

Six trial mixes · five noise seeds · synthetic neural activity

Supporting synthetic methods exploration developed with AI assistance.

Explore the rare-error experiment
Five synthetic noise-seed results at one error per stimulus: mean choice attribution 97.63%, with mean normalized reconstruction error 0.1000. Each plot shows all five seeds, on separate scales; ranges are not confidence intervals. One error per stimulus. Explore the other trial mixes.

EEG source modelling

UCL

Undergraduate Research Assistant

I work with Professor Lorenzo Fabrizi in UCL’s Medawar Pain and Somatosensory Labs. My work focuses on EEG source modelling: relating models of brain activity to signals measured at the scalp.

About & contact

I study neuroscience at UCL and build tools for exploring brains and data. I’m particularly interested in simulation, machine learning and making scientific ideas easier to inspect.

I’m interested in paid internships, scientific software work and research opportunities in brain modelling, computational neuroscience and machine learning.

MorphBrain Interactive model

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Illustrative model; parameters are not calibrated to biological measurements.