Improving Connectomics by an Order of Magnitude

Re:Improving Connectomics by an Order of Magnitude by saltcured on Monday July 16, 2018 @04:27PM (#17544787)

To really extract networks, you would need to either image synapses (very, very difficult since they are sub-micron sizes) to determine how cells connect, or image something like calcium potential to infer a circuit of active neurons as a very sparse subset of a larger set of observed cells during a particular kind of neural activity.

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Re:Improving Connectomics by an Order of Magnitude by jmrko on Monday July 16, 2018 @04:48PM (#17544949)

One of the authors here; Imaging synapses is really no problem with electron microscopy resolution. In fact, you can see automatically extracted synapses (little spheres) in the video of the blog post, this was done a year earlier already!

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Re:Improving Connectomics by an Order of Magnitude by saltcured on Monday July 16, 2018 @10:12PM (#17546794)

Oops, sorry, I have been talking to folks doing en vivo fluorescent imaging and didn't notice that this was electron microscopy!

Not only is the resolution a lot worse for optics, but I understand that the signal to noise ratio is much lower when avoiding destructive imaging methods.

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Re:Improving Connectomics by an Order of Magnitude by legatus on Monday July 16, 2018 @04:47PM (#17544943)

The paper (available at https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-01...) says that the part of the zebra finch brain analyzed had a resolution of 9 x 9 x 20 nanometers. If I'm reading it correctly, should they not be able to analyze synapses, too? At that resolution, shouldn't synapses have been imaged too?

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Re:Improving Connectomics by an Order of Magnitude by jmrko on Monday July 16, 2018 @04:51PM (#17544986)

That's correct - I imaged the volume and we extracted the synapses before (https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.4206).

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