W04 - Technology for achieving drosophila whole brain connectomics (09:00-11:30)

People who plan electron microscopy connectomics tend to underestimate the sheer amount of work required after serial section images are obtained. Here technical challenges and solutions for the fly connectome projects with transmission and focused ion beam scanning EM will be reported and shared with the people working on diverse organisms. Timing is ideal, because a series of FIB-SEM connectome papers will be published just before the Forum.

To promote communication we provide ten minute discussion for each talk:

• S. Plaza established a computational platform for analyzing EM section images and visualizing/annotating the traced data.
• M. Januszewski developed the first automated neuron segmentation algorithm that works with reliable precision, which was a breakthrough for FIB-SEM analysis.
• A. Cardona established a platform for cooperative manual segmentation/annotation and organized a large collaborative project.
• R. Parekh trained and coordinated a team of tens of technicians who segment, proofread, and annotate data of both TEM and FIB-SEM with high throughput.
• H. Otsuna developed systems for finding homologous neurons between EM and light microscopy images, making it possible to switch EM and LM analyses freely.