Animal behavior is governed by the activity of interconnected brain circuits. Comprehensive brain wiring maps are thus needed in order to formulate hypotheses about information flow and also to guide genetic manipulations aimed at understanding how genes and circuits orchestrate complex behaviors. A successful determination of how the brain's highly complex structure implements specific functions requires its decomposition into functional modules whose input-output relationships can be individually analyzed and whose interactions can be explained in terms of the groups of synaptic connections that exist between them.
The Fruit Fly Brain Observatory is a unique open source platform for studying fruit fly brain function, and for investigating fruit fly brain disease models that are highly relevant to the mechanisms of human neurological and psychiatric disorders. It
NeuroNLP provides a modern web-based portal for navigating fruit fly brain circuit data. It enables in-depth exploration and investigation of brain structure, using intuitive plain English queries, such as “show glutamatergic local neurons in the left antennal lobe”. NeuroNLP can be accessed from any browser supporting WebGL. Remember to check it out on your smartphone!
More text
NeuroGFX is a playground for executable neural circuits. With an intuitive graphical interface that visualizes biological circuit and their corresonding circuit diagrams with a hierarchical structure, NeuroGFX makes it easy to reconfigure brain circuits stored in the database, and, most importantly, execute them on GPUs to explore functions of the intact and reconfigured circuits. It presents a brain architecture in which models of different parts of the fruit fly brain can be integrated towards the exploration of whole brain function.
FFBO unifies and supports the research efforts of labs around the world, accelerating the pace of discovery and the translation of fundamental neuroscience research into drug, cell and gene therapies. The FFBO platform has been designed from the bottom up to be modular and expandable, supporting both publicly and privately hosted databases, opening up the possibilities of community integrated 'NeuroAPPs', where healthy and diseased models of the fruit fly brain circuits are hosted.
Supporting the NeuroNLP, NeuroGFX and NeuroAPPs is a highly sophisticated software architecture. The two key components at the back-end are
Located at Columbia University's Department of Electrical Engineering, the Bionet Group is an interdisciplinary research team bringing together faculty and students from the biological and engineering sciences focusing on understanding the function of neural circuits, and the architecture of the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) brain.
Located at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, the Brain Research Center devotes to the construction of fruit fly connectome with a joint effort from participating laboratories focusing on various topics, including neural circuit mechanisms of behavior and brain disorders, novel imaging technologies, advanced behavior apparatus, connectome analysis and computational modeling.
The Centre for Signal Processing and Complex Systems at the University of Sheffield supports a diverse range of multi-disciplinary research projects that span several departments and institutions. The Computational Neuroscience Group within the Centre is actively involved in the development of a mathematical theory of neural computation, visual information processing in Drosophila, optical brain imaging, large-scale modelling and simulation of neuronal systems.