Lab Publications
We mapped the full adult fly brain!
by Yijie Yin Another milestone in Fly Connectomics has been achieved! We are happy and *deeply* honoured to have contributed significantly to the mapping and annotation of the first synapse-resolution, full brain connectome of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster (‘Full Adult Fly Brain’, FAFB dataset1). The adult fruit fly is […]
The First Connectome of a Complex Ventral Nerve Cord
by Griffin Badalamente As recently announced, the Drosophila Connectomics group has preprinted three new papers documenting the creation, characterisation, and analysis of the complete connectome of a ventral nerve cord (VNC) of an adult male Drosophila melanogaster. The VNC is the insect equivalent of the vertebrate spinal cord and includes […]
What’s Connectomics Got to Do with It?
How Brain Mapping Helps Scientists Study the Brain Christopher Dunne There is widespread variance in peoples’ natural abilities and inclinations toward different subject areas from mathematics to the arts. Neuroscientists have often been interested in what differences in the brain lead to such differences in skills and have sometimes looked […]
Hey DAN, why you gotta be so different?
by Georgia Dempsey To find food and avoid danger in changing environments, animals benefit from learning to associate certain cues, such as odours, with pleasant or unpleasant experiences. Memories can be of positive or negative valence, reinforced by either rewarding or punitive stimuli. For example, the work of Pavlov demonstrated […]
Sniffing out the way to go down the line
by Nik Drummond and Alex Javier How can animals detect a stimulus and know how to act towards it? How do they integrate what they have learned in their lifetime with what their evolutionary history has ‘taught’ them about said stimulus? From insects to mammals, the circuits that encode information […]
Prepare for trouble, and make it double
by Billy Morris One of the key benefits of connectomics is that we establish the layout of the nervous system and its constituent elements. Knowing how the elements that make up the brain are connected simplifies the challenge of understanding how the brain processes information, executes behaviour and is modulated […]
Testing the water
All animals have a preferred temperature range, whether they’re crocodiles basking in the sun or a naked-mole rat burrowing underground. Being able to accurately sense environmental temperature (thermosensation) is a life or death scenario: too hot and the animal risks overheating whereas too cold can bring about hypothermia. Understanding how […]