Exploring Neurons with Virtual Fly Brain
After exploring the Cell Type Explorer and neuPrint, you might find a cell type with an interesting morphology or connectivity pattern.
Perhaps you have even developed a hypothesis about what that neuron might be doing. But what if you want to know more? Has this neuron been described before? Is there published research about its anatomy or function?
This is where Virtual Fly Brain (VFB) can be particularly useful.
Link: https://
What is Virtual Fly Brain?¶
Virtual Fly Brain is an interactive resource that brings together Drosophila neuroanatomy, connectivity, gene-expression data, images, and information from the published literature. These different sources are integrated so that researchers can search for neurons, compare anatomical data, find related neurons, and connect what they see in a dataset to existing biological knowledge.
VFB can do much more than we will cover here, including exploring gene expression and experimental reagents. For this competition, we will mainly use it to look up neurons and learn more about their anatomy and the literature associated with them.
Getting Started¶
Go to Virtual Fly Brain and click Launch VFB in the upper-right corner.
The homepage also contains a Learn More link leading to the VFB Documentation.
Now that you are familiar with terms such as cell type, neuropil, morphology, and connectivity, try reading some of the documentation yourself. A particularly useful section is:
Exploring the VFB¶
After reacing the Search and Query documentation, try searching for: AL-MBDL1
You may see several results. For now, simply select the first result that shows up.
One particularly useful feature is the Description. For this neuron, VFB describes an antennal-lobe-associated neuron whose branches extend through several central-brain neuropils before arborizing bilaterally across the antennal lobes, and links this description to Tanaka et al. (2012).
Notice how useful this is. In the previous tutorials, you observed the neuron’s morphology and connectivity yourself. VFB can now help you connect those observations to existing anatomical descriptions and published research.
So, you might start with Cell Type Explorer --> neuPrint/Neuroglancer --> Virtual Fly Brain.