Browsing by Author "Chuang, Chao-Chun"

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A Comprehensive Wiring Diagram of the Protocerebral Bridge for Visual Information Processing in the Drosophila Brain
(2013-05-01)
Lin, Chih-Yung
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Chuang, Chao-Chun
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Hua, Tzu-En
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Chen, Chun-Chao
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Dickson, Barry J.
How the brain perceives sensory information and generates meaningful behavior depends critically on its underlying circuitry. The protocerebral bridge (PB) is a major part of the insect central complex (CX), a premotor center that may be analogous to the human basal ganglia. Here, by deconstructing hundreds of PB single neurons and reconstructing them into a common three-dimensional framework, we have constructed a comprehensive map of PB circuits with labeled polarity and predicted directions of information flow. Our analysis reveals a highly ordered information processing system that involves directed information flow among CX subunits through 194 distinct PB neuron types. Circuitry properties such as mirroring, convergence, divergence, tiling, reverberation, and parallel signal propagation were observed; their functional and evolutional significance is discussed. This layout of PB neuronal circuitry may provide guidelines for further investigations on transformation of sensory (e.g., visual) input into locomotor commands in fly brains.
High-throughput Computer Method for 3D Neuronal Structure Reconstruction from the Image Stack of the Drosophila Brain and Its Applications
(2012-09-01)
Lee, Ping-Chang
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Chuang, Chao-Chun
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Chiang, Ann-Shyn
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Ching, Yu-Tai
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生物資訊及系統生物研究所
Drosophila melanogaster is a well-studied model organism, especially in the field of neurophysiology and neural circuits. The brain of the Drosophila is small but complex, and the image of a single neuron in the brain can be acquired using confocal microscopy. Analyzing the Drosophila brain is an ideal start to understanding the neural structure. The most fundamental task in studying the neural network of Drosophila is to reconstruct neuronal structures from image stacks. Although the fruit fly brain is small, it contains approximately 100 000 neurons. It is impossible to trace all the neurons manually. This study presents a high-throughput algorithm for reconstructing the neuronal structures from 3D image stacks collected by a laser scanning confocal microscope. The proposed method reconstructs the neuronal structure by applying the shortest path graph algorithm. The vertices in the graph are certain points on the 2D skeletons of the neuron in the slices. These points are close to the 3D centerlines of the neuron branches. The accuracy of the algorithm was verified using the DIADEM data set. This method has been adopted as part of the protocol of the FlyCircuit Database, and was successfully applied to process more than 16 000 neurons. This study also shows that further analysis based on the reconstruction results can be performed to gather more information on the neural network.
Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of Brain-wide Wiring Networks in Drosophila at Single-Cell Resolution
(2011-01-11)
Chiang, Ann-Shyn
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Lin, Chih-Yung
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Chuang, Chao-Chun
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Chang, Hsiu-Ming
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Hsieh, Chang-Huain
Background: Animal behavior is governed by the activity of interconnected brain circuits. Comprehensive brain wiring maps are thus needed in order to formulate hypotheses about information flow and also to guide genetic manipulations aimed at understanding how genes and circuits orchestrate complex behaviors. Results: To assemble this map, we deconstructed the adult Drosophila brain into approximately 16,000. single neurons and reconstructed them into a common standardized framework to produce a virtual fly brain. We have constructed a mesoscopic map and found that it consists of 41 local processing units (LPUs), six hubs, and 58 tracts covering the whole Drosophila brain. Despite individual local variation, the architecture of the Drosophila brain shows invariance for both the aggregation of local neurons (LNs) within specific LPUs and for the connectivity of projection neurons (PNs) between the same set of LPUs. An open-access image database, named FlyCircuit, has been constructed for online data archiving, mining, analysis, and three-dimensional visualization of all single neurons, brain-wide LPUs, their wiring diagrams, and neural tracts. Conclusion: We found that the Drosophila brain is assembled from families of multiple LPUs and their interconnections. This provides an essential first step in the analysis of information processing within and between neurons in a complete brain.