Accelerating with FlyBrainLab the discovery of the functional logic of the Drosophila brain in the connectomic and synaptomic era.

Aurel A Lazar,Tingkai Liu,Yiyin Zhou,Mehmet Kerem Turkcan

doi:10.7554/elife.62362

Abstract

In recent years, a wealth of Drosophila neuroscience data have become available including cell type and connectome/synaptome datasets for both the larva and adult fly. To facilitate integration across data modalities and to accelerate the understanding of the functional logic of the fruit fly brain, we have developed FlyBrainLab, a unique open-source computing platform that integrates 3D exploration and visualization of diverse datasets with interactive exploration of the functional logic of modeled executable brain circuits. FlyBrainLab's User Interface, Utilities Libraries and Circuit Libraries bring together neuroanatomical, neurogenetic and electrophysiological datasets with computational models of different researchers for validation and comparison within the same platform. Seeking to transcend the limitations of the connectome/synaptome, FlyBrainLab also provides libraries for molecular transduction arising in sensory coding in vision/olfaction. Together with sensory neuron activity data, these libraries serve as entry points for the exploration, analysis, comparison, and evaluation of circuit functions of the fruit fly brain.

Highlights

The era of connectomics/synaptomics ushered in the advent of large-scale availability of highly complex fruit fly brain data [1], [2], [3], [4], while simultaneously highlighting the dearth of computational tools with the speed and scale that can be effectively deployed to uncover the functional logic of fly brain circuits
Due 31 to space limitations, we mostly focus here on exploring, analyzing, comparing and evalu32 ating executable circuits informed by wiring diagrams derived from neuroanatomy datasets 33 currently available in public domain
The simplest way to build a fly brain circuit is via the NeuroNLP natural language query 104 interface [13]

Summary

Introduction

The era of connectomics/synaptomics ushered in the advent of large-scale availability of highly complex fruit fly brain data [1], [2], [3], [4], while simultaneously highlighting the dearth of computational tools with the speed and scale that can be effectively deployed to uncover the functional logic of fly brain circuits. There is a need to develop tightly in tegrated computing tools that automate the process of 3D exploration and visualization of fruit fly brain data with the interactive exploration of executable circuits. We mostly focus here on exploring, analyzing, comparing and evalu ating executable circuits informed by wiring diagrams derived from neuroanatomy datasets currently available in public domain. To meet this challenge we have built an open source interactive computing platform called FlyBrainLab. FlyBrainLab is uniquely positioned to accelerate the discovery of the func tional logic of the Drosophila brain. It is designed with three main capabilities in mind: 37 1) 3D exploration and visualization of fruit fly brain data, 2) creation of executable cir cuits directly from the explored and visualized fly brain data in step 1), and 3) interactive exploration of the functional logic of the executable circuits devised in step 2) (see Figure 1)

Methods

Results

Conclusion