The Wellcome Trust funds an international effort to understand the organisation of the fruit fly nervous system at the level of individual neurons and their synaptic connections. In 2016, a £3.25M, 4-year collaborative award was granted to Dr Gregory Jefferis and Dr Matthias Landgraf in the Zoology Department at the University of Cambridge, with co-applicants Dr Scott Waddell (Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, University of Oxford) and Dr Davi D Bock and Dr Gerald M Rubin (HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus, USA). Our current £4.1M, 4-year collaborative award has supported the continuation of this work since October 2020, now with co-applicants Dr Waddell, Dr Rubin, and Dr Gwyneth Card (HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus, USA).
We represent the Zoology Department, University of Cambridge branch of this international enterprise and work closely with Dr Gregory Jefferis’ research group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology as well as the groups of Drs Waddell, Card, and Rubin. We reconstruct, annotate, and analyse the synaptic connectivity of individual neurons in electron microscopy volumes of the adult fly brain and ventral nerve cord generated at Janelia (1,2). Our main goal thus far has been to elucidate the neural circuitry that underlies olfaction and olfactory-associated learning and memory. With the support of the current award, we are also investigating nervous system symmetry, stereotypy, and sexual dimorphism and descending control of motor output by the brain.
This blog is intended to make our work accessible to anyone interested, as well as scientific colleagues. We describe the history, methods, and findings of Connectomics as well as some of the neurobiological questions currently being researched in Drosophila, particularly olfaction and learning and memory.
1. Z Zheng*, JS Lauritzen*, E Perlman, CG Robinson, M Nichols, D Milkie, O Torrens, J Price, CB Fisher, N Sharifi, SA Calle-Schuler, L Kmecova, IJ Ali, B Karsh, ET Trautman, J Bogovic, P Hanslovsky, GSXE Jefferis, M Kazhdan, K Khairy, S Saalfeld, RD Fetter, DD Bock (2018) A Complete Electron Microscopy Volume of the Brain of Adult Drosophila melanogaster, Cell, 174:1-14
2. LK Scheffer, CS Xu,