Casey Schneider-Mlzell @csdashm@qoto.org

@neurolili @albertcardona as an in the weeds EM person like Albert, I feel like “fingerprints that clarify cognitive concepts” needs to be unpacked a bit for people who are mostly going after cellular-level mechanisms. One thing that’s hard is feeling like there are so many more details we know about drosophila or mouse visual cortex, and yet the feeling of “understanding” is still fleeting (albeit slowly coming into view in the fly, I think).

I won’t be going to #sfn22 this year, but my work will! Please come by board AA.12 on Tuesday morning around 9 am to learn about the anatomical organization of cell types and inhibitory connectivity across visual cortex. Long story short, layer 2 is really different than layer 3, different excitatory neurons have quite different synapse properties, layer 5 has oodles of very specific inhibition, and we found what seems to be a new class of disinhibition specialist interneurons.

@kristinmbranson I wonder how well you could train an image generation model based on those key points and your library of images. My initial thought was to try to make a clock out of fly leg positions for the hallway screen (maybe a wing for hours, an extended leg for minutes?) but there are probably a bunch of cute dataviz ideas there.

@kristinmbranson I like how it looks like technicolor laser speckle! Are the red and orange dots at 6 o'clock related to grooming?

Time for an #introduction. Nervous systems — yours, mine, those of mice, fish, and insects and worms — are made up of populations of different kinds of neurons that communicate with one another. Current electron microscopy generates millimeter-scale volumes with the morphology and synaptic connectivity of up to 10^5 neurons. As a scientist at the Allen Institute, I am mapping out the cell types and connectivity rules found in cortex and building computational tools to help others do the same.

@albertcardona @debivort The line “There are no studies conducted on the number of synapses in the whole brain of Drosophila, but there are several studies that estimated the number of synapses in particular areas of the Drosophila brain” does not give one much hope.