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Janelia releases 74,000 beautiful fruit fly brain images – and just made neuroscience research a lot easier.

Beautiful fruit fly brain images

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.

The FlyLight Project

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 images were released on February 23 in the journal eLife (link). This release is the culmination of years of effort and contributions from dozens of Janelians, starting in 2012.

Geoffrey Meissner, who was the project scientist for FlyLight and the first author of the new paper in eLife, said,

“It is a great resource for the community. 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.

Let’s create a database of fruit fly brains!

Janelia responded by creating the FlyLight Project Team, whose goal was to create genetically engineered flies that scientists could use to target specific neurons with greater precision. In 2012, Janelia released the first generation of these fly strains, known as the Generation 1 GAL4 driver lines, along with microscopy images that pinpointed the location of specific neurons in the brain.

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.

The complexities of mapping fruit fly brains

Since their development, Split-GAL4 lines and the Split-GAL4 system have been used by researchers worldwide. However, creating a specific Split-GAL4 for an experiment can be challenging. To do this, researchers must first label neurons of interest in GAL4 lines, which can be difficult for a single researcher.

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. It took over 11 years of imaging time on 8 confocal microscopes to generate the more than 70,000 detailed images that are now being released.

The NeuronBridge tool

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.”

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.”

Fruit fly brain picture gallery

Check out some the beautiful fruit fly images in the picture gallery below.

  • Fruit fly brain image metathoracic-GAL4-multichannel_mip
  • Fruit fly brain image ventral_nerve_cord-GAL4-JRC2018_VNC_Unisex-aligned_stack
  • Fruit fly brain image mesothoracic-GAL4-multichannel_mip
  • Fruit fly brain image ventral_nerve_cord-GAL4-JRC2018_VNC_Unisex-aligned_stack
  • Fruit fly brain image ventral_nerve_cord-GAL4-JRC2018_VNC_Unisex-aligned_stack
  • Fruit fly brain image ventral_nerve_cord-GAL4-JRC2018_VNC_Unisex-aligned_stack
  • Fruit fly brain image mesothoracic-GAL4-multichannel_mip

Image Credits

In-Article Image Credits

Beautiful fruit fly brain images via FlyLight Project Team at Janelia Research Campus with usage type - Creative Commons License
Fruit fly brain image metathoracic-GAL4-multichannel_mip via FlyLight Project Team at Janelia Research Campus with usage type - Creative Commons License
Fruit fly brain image ventral_nerve_cord-GAL4-JRC2018_VNC_Unisex-aligned_stack via FlyLight Project Team at Janelia Research Campus with usage type - Creative Commons License
Fruit fly brain image mesothoracic-GAL4-multichannel_mip via FlyLight Project Team at Janelia Research Campus with usage type - Creative Commons License
Fruit fly brain image ventral_nerve_cord-GAL4-JRC2018_VNC_Unisex-aligned_stack via FlyLight Project Team at Janelia Research Campus with usage type - Creative Commons License
Fruit fly brain image ventral_nerve_cord-GAL4-JRC2018_VNC_Unisex-aligned_stack via FlyLight Project Team at Janelia Research Campus with usage type - Creative Commons License
Fruit fly brain image ventral_nerve_cord-GAL4-JRC2018_VNC_Unisex-aligned_stack via FlyLight Project Team at Janelia Research Campus with usage type - Creative Commons License
Fruit fly brain image mesothoracic-GAL4-multichannel_mip via FlyLight Project Team at Janelia Research Campus with usage type - Creative Commons License

Featured Image Credit

Beautiful fruit fly brain images via FlyLight Project Team at Janelia Research Campus with usage type - Creative Commons License

 

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