📰 "Cellular and functional dissection of the octopaminergic system in the Drosophila brain"
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.06.704492v1?rss=1
#DrosophilaMelanogaster
#Connectomics
#Drosophila #Behaviour #Sensory
#Connectomics
By the way, unlike what the piece says, Murrhy and Seung did NOT "have the idea to use those images to identify and map the connections between each visible neuron, creating a connectome".
That idea had been floating about the field since Brenner and his C. elegans connectome, and those in a position to execute were the groups at Janelia with discretionary HHMI finding, like Rubin, Bock and myself. And we did.
What the Seung lab did was capitalise on the published EM volume of the adult female fly brain to apply more effective image registration and neuron segmentation approaches than the ones tried so far at that point by the Fly EM Project Team at Janelia. Synapses were detected by Julia Buhmann in saalfeld's lab at Janelia as well. The research groups led by Seung, Jefferis (at MRC LMB) and Murthy then put in the gargantuan effort of proofreading to deliver the published connectome.
Sunday slow rereading on #neuroscience #drosophila #flybrain #electromicroscopy #connectomics #omics
Holy Molly forgot this top notch quotation!?
,There is a before and after connectome—B.C. and A.C.’
@albertcardona referencing a well-known quote from #columbiaun #TheoreticalNeuroscience Larry Abbott
with this follow-up:
,It’s the end of the beginning’
https://www.science.org/content/article/complete-map-fruit-fly-brain-circuitry-unveiled
Invest in Brains, Not GPUs - Adam Marblestone and Dwarkesh Patel
We are hiring! SPecifically, a PostDoc for data management and connectomics as part of a large clinical research group. The details can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/epiconn_open-position-apply-now-the-epiconn-activity-7413211951125688320-Wqi5
Please apply if you are interested in up to four years in Vienna, one of the most liveable cities in the world!
#university #medicaluniversityofvienna
#research #vienna #austria #ismrm #mri #7Tesla #epilepsy #connectomics #data_management
Can neuroscientists decode memories solely from a map of synaptic connections?
| Five experts discuss the progress, possibilities and hurdles of decoding a “nontrivial” memory from an organism just by analyzing its brain connectivity patterns |
The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives
🎧🤷
https://www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspired/can-neuroscientists-decode-memories-solely-from-a-map-of-synaptic-connections/
📰 "Whole-brain connectomics of Drosophila reveals a robust, distributed architecture for the suppression of feeding during escape"
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.14.694122v1?rss=1
#Connectomics
#Drosophila
Our dispatch:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982225014691
on the recent Hydra volume EM paper by Zhang, Rafa Yuste and colleagues:
#connectomics, without synapses
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982225013090
After 3 years initiated by @flybrain using the #flywire, I finally did a pathway analysis via #Codex, gosh it is totally addictive, and the Youtube tutorial is so easy ! Why didnt I find time to run this..oh well! I just need to dig a bit more on genetic line fetching now..
#drosophila #connectomics #neuroscience
X-ray imaging at under 40 nm resolution without destroying the tissue: a demonstration by Wanner, Díaz, Schaefer and Bosch.
Based on radiation-had epoxy resin borrowed from the aerospace and nuclear industries.
"Tissue samples were resistant to radiation doses exceeding 1.15 × 1010 Gy, and sub-40 nm isotropic resolution allowed identifying axon bundles, dendrites and synapses in mouse brain tissue without physical sectioning."
"Nondestructive X-ray tomography of brain tissue ultrastructure", Bosch et al. 2025
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-025-02891-0
📰 "Synaptic MEMOIR: mapping individual synapses of neurons with protein barcodes"
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.25.690442v1?rss=1
#DrosophilaMelanogaster
#Connectomics
#Neuroscience
#Drosophila
"Just use Postgres until it breaks."
https://topicpartition.io/blog/postgres-pubsub-queue-benchmarks
We are far from that – we use #postgres to power #CATMAID for #connectomics and so far so good.
"Donald Knuth warned us in 1974 - premature optimization is the root of all evil. ... The point of this article is to show you that this “small scale” number has grown further than what people remember it to be - it can comfortably mean many megabytes per second. We are in a Postgres Renaissance for a reason: Postgres is frequently good enough. Modern NVMEs and cheap RAM allow it to scale absurdly high."
Songbird connectomics, from my colleague Joergen Kornfeld:
https://www.songbird-connectomics.org/
Includes the first connectome of basal ganglia.
Three key papers:
"The songbird basal ganglia connectome", Rother et al. 2025 (Kornfeld lab)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.25.684569v1
"An anatomical substrate of credit assignment in reinforcement learning", Kornfeld et al. 2025 (with Michael Fee as senior author)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.18.954354v2
"Songbird connectome reveals tunnelling of migratory neurons in the adult striatum", Shvedov et al. 2025 (B.B. Scott's lab)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.24.684388v1
#neuroscience #connectomics #ZebraFinch #songbirds #BasalGanglia
📰 "Synapse Detection Efficiency in EM Drosophila Connectomics"
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.16.682869v1?rss=1
#Connectomics
#Drosophila
For the worm there's the additional problem that the field has been working with point neurons for decades, ignoring the fact that most neurons in C. elegans have a very clear axon separate from its dendrite. I'd like to see a cleaned up connectome where there are 4 synaptic connectivity matrices and not one (axo-dendritic, axon-axonic, etc.), and I fear I may have to do so myself.
Modeling a connectome while mixing axo-dendritic with axo-axonic synapses with a point-neuron model is only asking for trouble and confusion.
The much awaited connectome of the male central nervous system of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster:
"Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system", Berg et al. 2025 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.09.680999v1
"contains 166,696 neurons spanning the brain and ventral nerve cord, fully proofread and comprehensively annotated including fruitless and doublesex expression and 11,691 cell types."
A collaboration between #HHMIJanelia, #MRCLMB and many others.
On descending control of thoracic GABAergic neurons that presynaptically (i.e., axo-axonically) modulate leg proprioprioceptive axons. So cool to see Wolf and Burrows 1995 in locust revisited in fruit flies:
"Selective presynaptic inhibition of leg proprioception in behaving Drosophila", Dallmann et al (Tuthill lab @tuthill ) 2025
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09554-2
If neuroscience ever delivers a volume of the human brain in sufficient resolution to map its connectome, the file system to store it will be like #TernFS :
https://www.xtxmarkets.com/tech/2025-ternfs/
Immutable, redundant, with structural sharing, snapshots, and distributed. In other words built from the ground up for concurrent reading and writing.
#connectomics
My colleage Donglai Wei is seeking to recruit postdocs and students at his lab in Boston College, Massachussets.
The topic: develop and implement machine learning methods for connectomics and for bioimagery more generally.
Our lab member Samia Mohinta @Mohinta2892 is featured in this outreach video prepared by the Accelerate Program for Scientific Discovery, explaining in lay terms how we map neural circuits in the fruit fly brain using machine learning approaches, AKA computer vision:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68fQ7ZGTxAQ
The eFIB-SEM instrument is featured, setup in the lab, as well as various views of the #MRCLMB.
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