Functional Connectome via Calcium Imaging

A recent study [1] has generated a neuronline behavior atlas of the Drosophila larval nervous system. “This atlas is a starting point for connectivity- and activity-mapping stud-ies to further investigate the mechanisms by which neurons mediate diverse behaviors.” Drosophila larvae, with 10,000 neurons, offer an opportunity to determine how an entire nervous system generates behavior. The current atlas is a fantastic step toward achiev-ing that goal – Timothy O’Leary & Eve Marder [2] write that it will “usher in a new era of integrated methods for deciphering how an entire nervous system generates behavior” and that it has “achieved a technical, multidisciplinary tour de force that will provide a rich source of research questions ” – but it needs to be refined to single neuron resolution. Marta Zlatic and Jim Truman at Janelia Farm have refined the library of neuronal lines used in the current publication, driving expression in a single cell pair in the larval ner-vous system. Optogenetically activation of this new collection will allow the application of multiscale unsupervised structure learning to the behavior data and yield a single neuron behavior map covering all neuron types in the larval nervous system. In parallel, Albert Cardona at Janelia Farm is using electron microscopy (EM) to map a wiring diagram of th