Connectomic reconstruction of a female Drosophila ventral nerve cord

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Azevedo, Anthony; Lesser, Ellen; Phelps, Jasper S.; Mark, Brandon; Elabbady, Leila; Kuroda, Sumiya; Sustar, Anne; Moussa, Anthony; Khandelwal, Avinash; Dallmann, Chris J.; Agrawal, Sweta; Lee, Su-Yee J.; Pratt, Brandon; Cook, Andrew; Skutt-Kakaria, Kyobi; Gerhard, Stephan; Lu, Ran; Kemnitz, Nico; Lee, Kisuk; Halageri, Akhilesh; Castro, Manuel; Ih, Dodam; Gager, Jay; Tammam, Marwan; Dorkenwald, Sven; Collman, Forrest; Schneider-Mizell, Casey; Brittain, Derrick; Jordan, Chris S.; Dickinson, Michael; Pacureanu, Alexandra; Seung, H. Sebastian; Macrina, Thomas; Lee, Wei-Chung Allen; Tuthill, John C.
• 署名单位: University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle; Harvard University; Harvard Medical School; California Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Princeton University; Allen Institute for Brain Science; European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF); Harvard University; Harvard University Medical Affiliates; Boston Children's Hospital; Harvard Medical School; Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne; Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
• 刊物名称: Nature
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0028-4032
• DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07389-x
• 发表日期: 2024-07-11
• 页码: 360-+
• 关键词: giant fiber pathway; motor-neurons; muscle; motoneurons; ORGANIZATION; architecture; components; circuits; anatomy

摘要

A deep understanding of how the brain controls behaviour requires mapping neural circuits down to the muscles that they control. Here, we apply automated tools to segment neurons and identify synapses in an electron microscopy dataset of an adult female Drosophila melanogaster ventral nerve cord (VNC)(1), which functions like the vertebrate spinal cord to sense and control the body. We find that the fly VNC contains roughly 45 million synapses and 14,600 neuronal cell bodies. To interpret the output of the connectome, we mapped the muscle targets of leg and wing motor neurons using genetic driver lines(2) and X-ray holographic nanotomography(3). With this motor neuron atlas, we identified neural circuits that coordinate leg and wing movements during take-off. We provide the reconstruction of VNC circuits, the motor neuron atlas and tools for programmatic and interactive access as resources to support experimental and theoretical studies of how the nervous system controls behaviour.