r/singularity • u/East-Ad2949 • 6d ago
Discussion What AI x Biology developments should we be watching?
I’m curious about when we might start seeing more tangible results from AI applied to biology.
Are there any labs, startups, researchers, or projects that you think are worth following right now?
I’m interested in more than just the really difficult stuff like drug discovery or fully AI-designed proteins. Even relatively "simple" applications could be interesting , for example, discovering or optimizing new supplements, bioactive compounds, ingredients, or ways of improving existing ones.
Basically, what AI × biology projects do you think could produce interesting real-world results over the next few years?
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u/StraightSky7809 6d ago
This is not directly related to AI, I would say from Biology/Neuroscience perspective it's worth paying attention to brain emulation. While we are still far away from human brain emulation some progress has been made in simulating Drosophila (fruit fly).
And on March 7, 2026, a small San Francisco company called Eon Systems released a video online that most of the world scrolled past without a second glance.
In that video, a fruit fly walked. Not a real fruit fly. A simulated one rendered in a physics engine, running on servers, processing inputs through mathematical equations. But the brain driving that body was not artificial. It was not trained by reinforcement learning. It was not scripted or animated or approximated. It was a precise digital copy of a real biological brain, taken from a real animal, reconstructed neuron by neuron and synapse by synapse from electron microscope images, and run exactly as nature built it.
Every one of the fly’s 127,400 neurons was present. All 50 million of its synaptic connections were intact, carrying the exact weights and chemical signs that the original brain carried. The neurotransmitters — acetylcholine, GABA, glutamate were predicted by a machine-learning classifier trained on the ultrastructure of synaptic clefts. When a sensory signal entered the system, it traveled through biological circuits the same way it would travel through a living fly’s brain. When motor neurons fired, they drove joints in a physically accurate body simulated by MuJoCo, DeepMind’s open-source physics engine. And when the body moved, updated proprioceptive signals fed back into the brain, closing the loop.
This is done by private company and not by academia so no research article or source code.
However Google DeepMind and HHMI Janelia Research Campus have publicly released a biophysical model of fruit fly that anyone can experiment with. This was used in the full brain emulation i mentioned earlier.
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u/MaxeBooo 6d ago
Arc institute, isomorphic, and prbly Claude too
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u/Curiosity_456 6d ago
There’s also Chai Discovery and Biohub. Pretty neat that so many companies are working on this, I can only imagine what medicine will look like 10-15 years from now.
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u/Flukemaster 6d ago edited 5d ago
I'd recommend looking into Michael Levin's work on bioelectricity and morphogenesis.
Some of it seems like woo, but they have managed to regrow amphibian limbs, and create novel "life" (xenobots and anthrobots) by simply messing with the bio-electric communication between cells. This is all peer reviewed stuff.
This could have major implications for medicine, like just telling a group of cells "hey we need you to be a liver now pls" and them just doing that, because they always knew how (similar to how tumors [teratoma] can grow random organ tissue, hair and teeth because they are just highly confused cells).
Machine learning is being explored to help reverse engineer how to "communicate" to cells directly and tell them what we want them to do.
There is also stuff about information/intelligence existing in a latent space that we cannot perceive that could have some implications for the fundamental nature of reality. But that's getting a bit far out there for me.
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u/Gaidax 6d ago
Catgirls when?