“Saturated Reconstruction of a Volume of Neocortex”, Narayanan Kasthuri, Kenneth Jeffrey Hayworth, Daniel Raimund Berger, Richard Lee Schalek, José Angel Conchello, Seymour Knowles-Barley, Dongil Lee, Amelio Vázquez-Reina, Verena Kaynig, Thouis Raymond Jones, Mike Roberts, Josh Lyskowski Morgan, Juan Carlos Tapia, H. Sebastian Seung, William Gray Roncal, Joshua Tzvi Vogelstein, Randal Burns, Daniel Lewis Sussman, Carey Eldin Priebe, Hanspeter Pfister, Jeff William Lichtman2015-07-30 (cryonics, neuroscience; backlinks; similar)⁠:

• Tape-based pipeline for electron microscopic reconstruction of brain tissue

• Annotated database of 1,700 synapses from a saturated reconstruction of cortex

• Excitatory axon proximity to dendritic spines not sufficient to predict synapses

We describe automated technologies to probe the structure of neural tissue at nanometer resolution and use them to generate a saturated reconstruction of a sub-volume of mouse neocortex in which all cellular objects (axons, dendrites, and glia) and many sub-cellular components (synapses, synaptic vesicles, spines, spine apparati, postsynaptic densities, and mitochondria) are rendered and itemized in a database.

We explore these data to study physical properties of brain tissue. For example, by tracing the trajectories of all excitatory axons and noting their juxtapositions, both synaptic and non-synaptic, with every dendritic spine we refute the idea that physical proximity is sufficient to predict synaptic connectivity (the so-called Peters’ rule).

This online minable database provides general access to the intrinsic complexity of the neocortex and enables further data-driven inquiries.

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