74,000 fruit fly brain images released

Date:
March 1, 2023
Source:
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Summary:
Neuroscience research just got a little bit easier, thanks to the
release of tens of thousands of images of fruit fly brain neurons.


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FULL STORY ========================================================================== Neuroscience research just got a little bit easier, thanks to the release
of tens of thousands of images of fruit fly brain neurons generated by Janelia's FlyLight Project Team.


==========================================================================
Over eight years, the FlyLight Project Team and collaborators dissected, labeled, and imaged the neurons of more than 74,000 fruit fly brains,
taken from more than 5,000 different genetically modified fly strains.

Now, these images are being made freely available, enabling scientists
to quickly and easily find the neurons they need to test theories about
how the nervous system works.

The release of the images February 23 in the journal eLife is the
culmination of years of effort and contributions from dozens of
Janelians, starting in 2012. It demonstrates Janelia's commitment to
creating free resources useful to the entire scientific community. It
also highlights the research campus's mission to take on projects that
can't be accomplished in a traditional research environment where these long-term efforts are often not funded or incentivized.

"It is a great resource for the community," says Geoffrey Meissner,
who was the project scientist for FlyLight and the first author of the
new paper in eLife.

"It's very squarely in Janelia's mission, and it highlights the Project
Teams as a concept -- of doing these big things beyond the scale of what a
lab could reasonably do -- and really emphasizes the open science aspect
of Janelia's goals. We want to go the extra mile to make it available to everybody, to make it easy, to make it more comprehensive." Using fruit
flies for neuroscience research The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster
is a staple of neuroscience research.

Scientists use genetically engineered fruit flies to target the expression
of certain neurons, allowing researchers to understand which brain cells control certain behaviors.

Scientists were using fruit flies to understand the nervous system when
Janelia opened in 2006, but researchers did not have tools precise enough
to implicate individual neurons.

That led Janelia to create the FlyLight Project Team, which set out to
create genetically engineered flies that scientists could use to home
in on specific neurons with more precision. In 2012, Janelia released
the first generation of those fly strains, the Generation 1 GAL4 driver
lines, along with microscopy images showing where in the brain specific
neurons resided.

But the Generation 1 lines were still too imprecise for some neuroscience research. So FlyLight developed strains of fruit flies from these GAL4
lines using the Split-GAL4 approach that enabled scientists to identify
single neurons or single cell types in the fly brain.

Since they were developed, the Split-GAL4 lines and the Split-GAL4 system
have been used by researchers worldwide. But figuring out how to create
a specific Split-GAL4 needed for an experiment can be challenging. To
do this, researchers first need to label neurons of interest in GAL4
lines -- a task that can be difficult for a single researcher.

To help, the FlyLight team used a technique called MultiColor FlpOut
(MCFO), developed by Aljoscha Nern, a senior scientist in the Rubin Lab,
to label individual neurons in Generation 1 GAL4 driver lines. Generating
the more than 70,000 detailed images now being released required over
11 years of imaging time on 8 confocal microscopes.

Janelia's Scientific Computing team created a freely available tool
called NeuronBridge that allows researchers to search the MCFO-labeled
images, along with other light and electron microscopy data, to home
in on neurons of interest. It also enables researchers to predict the Split-GAL4 combinations they will need for their experiments.

"FlyLight made a lot of images, but without our close collaboration
with Scientific Computing, it would just be terabytes of data sitting
on a hard drive that nobody could do anything with. They played a key
role in making it usable for people," says Meissner, who is now senior
manager of Project Pipeline Support, which continues to offer FlyLight pipelines to Janelia labs.

A worldwide resource The publication in eLife marks the official release
of the images, but neuroscientists all over the world have already been
taking advantage of the data since their initial release in 2020.

The latest effort builds on Janelia's reputation for developing tools
that facilitate fruit fly research.

"The general feeling is that for anybody doing fly neuroscience who
wants to target a neuron and learn something about it, the best way is
using the GAL4 lines characterized by FlyLight," Meissner says.

* RELATED_TOPICS
o Plants_&_Animals
# Genetically_Modified
# Insects_(including_Butterflies) # Animals #
Biology # Mice # Biotechnology_and_Bioengineering #
Biochemistry_Research # Animal_Learning_and_Intelligence
* RELATED_TERMS
o Neurobiology o Drosophila_melanogaster o Mirror_neuron o
Brain o Housefly o Anticonvulsant o Computational_neuroscience
o Sympathetic_nervous_system

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Howard_Hughes_Medical_Institute. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Geoffrey Wilson Meissner, Aljoscha Nern, Zachary Dorman, Gina M
DePasquale, Kaitlyn Forster, Theresa Gibney, Joanna H Hausenfluck,
Yisheng He, Nirmala A Iyer, Jennifer Jeter, Lauren Johnson,
Rebecca M Johnston, Kelley Lee, Brian Melton, Brianna Yarbrough,
Christopher T Zugates, Jody Clements, Cristian Goina, Hideo
Otsuna, Konrad Rokicki, Robert R Svirskas, Yoshinori Aso, Gwyneth
M Card, Barry J Dickson, Erica Ehrhardt, Jens Goldammer, Masayoshi
Ito, Dagmar Kainmueller, Wyatt Korff, Lisa Mais, Ryo Minegishi,
Shigehiro Namiki, Gerald M Rubin, Gabriella R Sterne, Tanya Wolff,
Oz Malkesman. A searchable image resource of Drosophila GAL4-driver
expression patterns with single neuron resolution.

eLife, 2023; 12 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.80660 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230301185228.htm

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