Fruit Fly Brain Atlas Decoded

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.

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}:

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

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