Stephan Saalfeld @herrsaalfeld@qoto.org

@albertcardona @NicoleCRust @neurobongo @xaq

It’s a very fair critique, and some of the PR does us more harm than good. For example, we don’t have a map of 100,000 cells that tells us little, we have an EM volume spanning 100,000 cells that was at the edge of what was possible at the time that still requires a lot of (manual or automated) proofreading to turn into analyzable data.

The full set of initial science papers from the mm3 volume is almost ready to submit, but our existing work has started to reveal details about the nature of connectivity in a cell-type-specific manner. For example, a 2022 eLife paper (Dorkenwald et al.) shows that you see a bimodal distribution of synapse sizes on layer 2/3 cells, but _only_ if you restrict analysis to synapses from other layer 2/3 cells. Similarly, we found a variety of factors that could predict how much chandelier input a pyramidal cell would receive. These data suggest that neurons have type-specific rules for connectivity and plasticity that are hard to see if you can’t separate connections out this way.

More recently (as in Monday), I posted a manuscript to the biorxiv describing inhibitory connectivity across a column of visual cortex that shows that inhibitory selectivity (at least at the cell type level) is the norm, not the exception. In particular, we find selective inhibition not only for each excitatory projection class (IT, NP, ET, and CT) as well as sublaminar groups of IT neurons. This suggests a network of precise inhibition across cortex. We also find a new class of disinhibitory specialist interneuronal that targets basket cells, unlike the well-described VIP->SST circuit. This opens up a host of follow up questions, and we hope that using patch-seq data to link EM data to transcriptomics will help make this experimentally possible.

Ultimately, I think we’re still in the early days of getting the data out and finding the science in it. This is very much like in Drosophila, where the first studies at the whole-brain scale were highly focused. But I believe it will go the same way, becoming a way to study large scale structure at single cell resolution, complementing single lab studies, and helping answer unexpected questions. For example, one of my colleagues noticed that oligodendrocyte precursor cells in the EM looked like they were doing phagocytosis, which wasn’t a known function for them, and she just published a nice PNAS paper (Buchanan et al) about it.

I just encountered my first conference that won't allow me to give a remote talk when an emergency (ish -- gave 3 weeks notice) responsibility as a caregiver came up. It's not a big deal to me not to give a talk, I'm just kind of disappointed in the organizers.

The party of free speech, folks!

Florida teachers told to remove books from classroom libraries or risk felony prosecution

@juddlegum

https://popular.info/p/florida-teachers-told-to-remove-books

This whole essay is so damn good that it was hard to pick a pull-quote.

"This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

@Mbussonn Best via:

$ git config --global pull.rebase true

THREAD: Falls are a major public health problem — a top-20 cause of death in the US. Wonder what scientists are doing about that? @yunluzhu & colleagues in my lab developed powerful new tech to understand balance & evaluate therapeutics.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.07.523102v1
Want to know more / watch neat movies? 1/9

#mastopiece #neuroscience #balance #drosophila #celegans #zebrafish

Thx for boosting (we’re trying to outdo that other place)!