Video: Building a fly brain, neuron by neuron
A visualisation from the Lo lab at National Tsing Hua University building a fly brain from FlyCircuit data by placing around 18,000 individually reconstructed neurons into position one by one.
The Chung-Chuan Lo laboratory at National Tsing Hua University’s Brain Research Center, Taiwan, has produced “Building a fly brain (HD),” a visualisation that assembles a fruit fly brain by placing roughly 18,000 individually reconstructed neurons into their positions one at a time — about 20% of the estimated total neurons in a fly brain. Every neuron shown was constructed from data in the FlyCircuit database, accompanying Chiang et al.’s “Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of Brain-wide Wiring Networks in Drosophila at Single-Cell Resolution” (Current Biology, 2011).
Watching individual, single-cell-resolution reconstructions accumulate neuron by neuron into a complete brain gives an intuitive sense of the sheer density and diversity of cell types packed into this tiny structure — long before whole-brain electron microscopy connectomes existed, single-neuron light-level reconstruction projects like FlyCircuit were already mapping the fly brain’s morphology at scale.
FlyCircuit’s single-neuron reconstructions are among the resources integrated into Virtual Fly Brain alongside our other connectomics resources, letting anyone query, browse and analyse it interactively.
Video: “Building a fly brain (HD)”, © Chung-Chuan Lo laboratory, National Tsing Hua University. Music: “The Simple Complex” by UncleBibby (CC BY 4.0).