braincode
This is an example image from clustering the entire Drosophila brain into 60 clusters. Each color indicates an automatically segmented cluster and thus indicates a distinct pattern of enhancer expression. Finer scale clustering was performed on several brain regions, and can be explored interactively on this website.
About the braincode project
This web site contains the results of automated segmentations of the Drosophila brain. The goal of the segmentations was to rapidly identify "functional units" - neuropils and axon tracts, for example - of the fly brain. The principle on which the segmentations were based is that the pattern of enhancer activity within a functional unit is more similar than in other regions. Based on this principle, we used k-medoids clustering on two large datasets of enhancer-GAL4 expression patterns, the Vienna Tiles library and the Janelia Fly Light library.
Paper describing the details
Panser K, Tirian L, Schulze F, Villalba S, Jefferis GSXE, Bühler K, Straw AD (2016) Automatic segmentation of Drosophila neural compartments using GAL4 expression data reveals novel visual pathways. Current Biology. Open-Access Link DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.05.052
Analysis source code
Acknowledgments
We thank Barry Dickson for access to the Vienna Tiles library. We thank the Janelia Fly Light team for access to the Janelia Fly Light library. Arnim Jennet provided a 3D atlas of brain regions. This work was supported by ERC Starting Grant 281884 "FlyVisualCircuits" to ADS, FFG Headquarter Grant 834223 to the IMP and VRVis, and by IMP core funding.
Future improvements
We may add features, but we intend to keep all links unchanged the long term, so it is safe to directly link pages within.
If you have suggestions or ideas for future developments, contact Andrew Straw
.