Fruit Fly Brain Atlas Decoded

By jtoney on December 31, 2010.

My previous postings on the fruit fly brain generated quite a bit of interest, and I wanted to share with you some more detail that I received from Terry C.-W. Yeh, researcher at the Applied Scientific Computing Division of the National Center for High-Performance Computing in Taiwan. Thank you, Terry, for being so gracious!

I hope you enjoy this decoded tour as much as I have.
i-4d530aaf92feb2d5d78dd2de94f2cd68-Neurons_150_Fly-thumb-960x720-59729.jpg

Detail of 150 neurons.

Ever wonder about the distribution of neurotransmitters throughout the brain? {Recall my recent posting about dopamine receptors and liberalism - OK, there's no such thing as a "liberal" fly!}

Here's a high resolution view {I recommend using the "popup" function}:

i-40e353a46e96ff91f1340d5deebdfec8-Fly_Neurotransmitters-thumb-960x720-59732.jpg

Finally, below is the full legend decoding the color scheme used {For example, optic nerves are brown; "pop up" function recommended}:

i-39725c902a920475f9ccd9331be17905-Fly_Color_Code-thumb-960x720-59735.jpg

According to the paper:

Using the grayscale values of the anti-DLG immunostaining, each of the 16,000 sample images was registered to one of the two template brains by a global affine registration.

Source: Chiang et al., 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

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