A 3D Tour of the Fruit Fly Brain

I received a nice "holiday gift" from a researcher at the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan, Terry C.-W. Yeh. NCHC and the Brain Research Center at the National Tsing Hua University created the FlyCircuit database.

This 32 second video gives you a 3D tour of the various components of the fruit fly brain integrating data collected using more than 16,000 individual neurons - a startling example, to me, of the wonderment of science as a product of bridging computer science, molecular biology and neuroscience! I hope you enjoy.

Please let me know if you share this video with friends and colleagues, or use this video for teaching and learning.

This video is used with permission by:

Terry C.-W. Yeh èæå
Associate Researcher
Applied Scientific Computing Division
National Center for High-Performance Computing,
National Applied Research Laboratories
No.7, R&D 6th Rd.
Science-Based Industrial Park
Hsinchu, Taiwan

About FlyCircuit:

FlyCircuit is designed as a public database for online archiving, cell type inventory, browsing, searching, analysis and 3D visualization of individual neurons in the standard model brain of adult male and female Drosophila. For more details please read the associated manuscript -- "Three-dimensional reconstruction of brain-wide wiring networks in Drosophila at single-cell resolution" (Current Biology 2010, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.11.056). Registration is free and automatic. We suggest you use the e-mail address from your affiliation for future communication about your account.

Java (Download) is needed for interactive 3D visualization. Your computer may already have one.

For the novice, we recommend to start from "Gallery" for application examples and "Help/Tutor" for step-by-step demonstrations.