Albert CardonaScience undergrad research program at HHMI Janelia: "a paid, nine-week summer research" at an outstanding research institute.
Deadline: December 22nd, 2025
Note "HHMI does not sponsor visas for this program" – meaning, largely for US students only.
The much awaited connectome of the male central nervous system of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster:
"Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system", Berg et al. 2025 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.09.680999v1
"contains 166,696 neurons spanning the brain and ventral nerve cord, fully proofread and comprehensively annotated including fruitless and doublesex expression and 11,691 cell types."
A collaboration between #HHMIJanelia, #MRCLMB and many others.
Philip HubbardWhat does a neural network look like? Maybe like this view of Larissa Heinrich's U-net for organelle segmentation, with edges between layer inputs and outputs.
Want to help build networks like this? Join #HHMIJanelia's new AI initiative as a data engineer:
https://hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External/details/Data-Engineer-III_R-3509-1
Cleaning up disk space, I found this image I made for someone not long after the release of the #HHMIJanelia #Drosophila hemibrain #connectome in 2020. It shows EPG neurons in pink providing inputs to PFL1 neurons in transparent grey. I'm not sure if the image was ever used.
Here's a #MicroscopyMonday segmentation of some neurons from the optic lobe, or visual processing area of the #Drosophila fruit fly's brain. The #connectome for the full optic lobe was released in 2024 by #HHMIJanelia, Google, and the University of Cambridge, with support from the Wellcome Trust.
This segmentation of #MicroscopyMonday data reconstructs neurons of the "MANC", or male adult nerve cord, from the #Drosophila fruit fly. The nerve cord is like a spinal cord and connects the brain and muscles. #HHMIJanelia, Google, and the University of Cambridge released this work in 2023.
The #HHMIJanelia FlyEM team's project page for the hemibrain:
https://www.janelia.org/project-team/flyem/hemibrain
The neuVid system, used for creating the video:
https://github.com/connectome-neuprint/neuVid
Hemibrain
The hemibrain connectome includes many of the brain areas that scientists are most interested in studying, such as circuits that control learning, memory, and key fly behaviors. The hemibrain connectome is the largest synaptic-level connectome ever reconstructed. It covers a large portion of the central fly brain, including the mushroom body and central complex circuits
On this day 5 years ago #HHMIJanelia and Google released the "hemibrain", a map of neural connections in much of the #Drosophila fly brain. At the time it was the largest such #connectome ever created. Here's a video from the release (polished a bit), showing the interesting shapes of the neurons.
...then proofreaders from #HHMIJanelia made fixes. Here's a tool proofreaders used, to cleave false merges by designating seeds on different neurons, which Stuart Berg's graph algorithm then separated. The video's from 5 years ago so it looks a bit old fashioned, but the tool still works!
A use of #MicroscopyMonday data is making segmentations. Here's one, of #Drosophila protocerebral bridge and nodulus neurons, from the 2020 Hemibrain by #HHMIJanelia and Google. Michał Januszewski and Viren Jain's team made an initial segmentation with #AI flood-fill algorithms...
