Past Winners / Image Archive
2021 WINNERS
Janelia FlyEM Hemibrain Overview
The Janelia FlyEM hemibrain is the largest synaptic-level connectome ever reconstructed. It covers a large portion of the central Drosophila brain, including the mushroom body and central complex circuits critical for associative learning and fly navigation. This connectome reconstruction contains around 25,000 neurons, which can be grouped into thousands of distinct cell types spanning several brain regions; examples of the cell types for important regions appear in this video. Building this connectome required advances in imaging, segmentation (by the Connectomics Group at Google), and proofreading and analysis software. Analyzing this connectome is revealing new and unexpected insights into neural circuit structure, leading to improved theory and experimental design.
Video Credit: Philip Hubbard
Scheffer LK, …. , Plaza SM.
A connectome and analysis of the adult Drosophila central brain.
Elife. 2020 Sep 7;9:e57443.
Drosophila larval brain labeled by targeting CLADES to progenitor cells
CLADES allows labeling cell lineages with a programmable sequence of fluorescent reporters. Drosophila larval brain labeled by targeting CLADES to progenitor cells (neuroblasts). Coupled to neuroblast division, CLADES labels progenitors with a cascade of colors that progresses throughout development. Neurons generated from these progenitors inherit a sequential cascade of reporters in order: green, yellow, red, purple and blue. Early- and late-born neurons become labeled with the first or the last colors in the sequence respectively
Image Credit: Jorge Garcia-Marques
Garcia-Marques, J., Espinosa-Medina, I., Ku, K., Yang, C., Koyama, M., Yu, H., & Lee, T.
(2020). A programmable sequence of reporters for lineage analysis.
Nature Neuroscience 2020 Dec;23(12):1618-1628