Seung Lab (original) (raw)

Welcome to the Connectomic Era

The firstneuronal wiring diagram for a brain was recently released, and has leaped orders of magnitude beyond the 1986 wiring diagram of the_C. elegans_ nervous system. This historic milestone showcases the revolutionary progress achieved in EM image acquisition and analysis over the past decade. The connectomic era has finally begun.

The Seung lab first appliedconvolutional nets to EM image analysis in 2007, and continued development of this approach resulted in the fly connectome and a wiring diagram of acortical column . Now we are passing the baton toZetta AI , which will continue innovating to create the artificial intelligence required to scale up connectomics to a mouse brain and beyond.

The Seung lab has shut down its EM image analysis effort, and refocused on making discoveries about brain function, as well as brain development and plasticity.

Our Research

Interpretation of connectomes

We are devising concepts and methods for interpreting neuronal wiring diagrams. The fly connectome includes as a corollary the first wiring diagram of a visual system. By studying this wiring diagram, we have discovered a new circuit forform vision in the fly brain. We have also discovered that many inhibitory interneuron types function as a highly diverse set of normalization mechanisms in fly vision. Both of these discoveries draw on the striking analogy between the fly visual system and convolutional nets.

Reconstructing neural circuits

In ongoing collaborations, we are applying and refining connectomic technologies to reconstruct more fly connectomes (Mala Murthy), as well as a patch of mouse retina (Thomas Euler). We are reconstructing mouse neural circuits for memory (David Tank), decision making (Adrian Wanner and Jeff Lichtman), and reinforcement learning (Ilana Witten). These collaborations make use of the high throughput EM facility at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. In many of the projects, neural circuit reconstruction is preceded by calcium imaging of neural activity_in vivo_.

Scaling down to molecules

The fly connectome was reconstructed fromEM images with 4×4×40 nm³ voxels, which is sufficient for detecting chemical synapses and tracing the "wires" of the brain. This resolution might seem very fine, but is actually coarse compared to the 0.1 nm theoretical limit of EM. There is plenty of room at the bottom. Serial section EM tomography can improve resolution; the challenge is to deliver this improvement over much larger volumes than before. One can imagine, for example, imaging an entire fly brain at 4×4×4 nm³ or 2×2×2 nm³ resolution. This would reveal brain cell biology in fantastic detail, within the full context of neurons and their connections.

Highlighted Publications

Our Team

Principal Investigator

Prof. Sebastian Seung

Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Computer Science

Postdoctoral Researchers

Graduate Students

Staff

Image Analysts

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