Cell
Volume 174, Issue 3, 26 July 2018, Pages 730-743.e22
Journal home page for Cell

Resource
A Complete Electron Microscopy Volume of the Brain of Adult Drosophila melanogaster

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.06.019Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • A complete adult Drosophila brain was imaged with EM and has been made publicly available

  • The imaged volume enables brain-spanning mapping of circuits at synaptic resolution

  • All mushroom body (MB) calyx inputs were mapped, revealing a new cell type, MB-CP2

  • Previously unidentified synaptic partners form recurrent microcircuits in MB calyx

Summary

Drosophila melanogaster has a rich repertoire of innate and learned behaviors. Its 100,000-neuron brain is a large but tractable target for comprehensive neural circuit mapping. Only electron microscopy (EM) enables complete, unbiased mapping of synaptic connectivity; however, the fly brain is too large for conventional EM. We developed a custom high-throughput EM platform and imaged the entire brain of an adult female fly at synaptic resolution. To validate the dataset, we traced brain-spanning circuitry involving the mushroom body (MB), which has been extensively studied for its role in learning. All inputs to Kenyon cells (KCs), the intrinsic neurons of the MB, were mapped, revealing a previously unknown cell type, postsynaptic partners of KC dendrites, and unexpected clustering of olfactory projection neurons. These reconstructions show that this freely available EM volume supports mapping of brain-spanning circuits, which will significantly accelerate Drosophila neuroscience.

Keywords

electron microscopy
connectomics
neural circuits
Drosophila melanogaster
mushroom body
olfaction
image stitching

Cited by (0)

7

These authors contributed equally

8

Present address: Center for Imaging Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA

9

Present address: Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA 20147, USA

10

Present address: Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA

11

Lead Contact