Welcome to FlyWire, a new project to map the entire adult Drosophila (fruit fly) brain!
Jump into the neuroscientific fun at flywire.ai. You’ll need a google account to participate.
Why the Fly?
The fruit fly has become an important scientific animal model to study over the past century. Many factors make Drosophila a great research candidate, including their genetic similarities to humans (we share about 75% of disease causing genes), and their short lifespans that allow observation of multiple generations in just a series of months. Their small size and simple diet also allow scientists to keep and observe many at a time.
Fruit flies have contributed to research on cancer, Alzheimers, and Zika, as well taught scientists about decision making and circadian rhythms.
Currently, the only animal with a fully mapped connectome is C. elegans, a roundworm with 302 neurons whose full nervous system diagram was published in 1986. If we can map the full brain of the fruit fly, an animal with about 115,000 neurons, it will be a big accomplishment for science! Imagine how much more we can learn with a fully mapped fruit fly connectome!
Technological improvements in FlyWire
Flywire is built on the EM (electron microscopy) dataset of a full female adult fly brain (Zheng et al. 2018) produced at the Janelia Research Campus. The Seung and Murthy labs at Princeton have developed a system that pulls large segments of neurons from the compiled images in the dataset using machine learning. Because large portions of these 3D models are produced by AI, the proofreading process has been immensely accelerated, allowing for a very efficient reconstruction process.
This also means that the proofreading process will look a bit different from Seung Lab’s last brain-mapping project, Eyewire. Instead of joining many little segments together to form a neuron, players will observe a mostly fully-formed neuron (good job AI!) and check for any mistaken merger segments, and areas where segments are missing.
FlyWire Proofreading 101
If this sounds like a fun, scientifically important project, and you’re ready to join in, let’s begin!