FAFB CATMAID Data Viewer

Access

The FAFB CATMAID instance is hosted and maintained by Virtual Fly Brain (VFB) as part of their mission to integrate and preserve key Drosophila neuroscience datasets. The instance is accessible at: https://fafb.catmaid.virtualflybrain.org/

This resource provides access to the FAFB dataset and its associated neural reconstructions. Virtual Fly Brain ensures its long-term availability to the research community.

Source Publications

Primary Resources

• FAFB Project: https://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/research/groups/connectomics
• EM Dataset: Zheng Z, et al. (2018) A Complete Electron Microscopy Volume of the Brain of Adult Drosophila melanogaster. Cell, 174(3), 730-743.e22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.06.019

Contributing Publications

The database includes neurons traced and published in numerous studies. Each neuron is annotated with its source publication. Major contributing publications include:

• Baltruschat et al. (2021)
• Bates and Schlegel et al. (2020)
• Coates et al. (2020)
• Dolan and Belliart-Guérin et al. (2018)
• Dolan et al. (2019)
• Engert et al. (2022)
• Felsenberg et al. (2018)
• Gorko et al. (2024)
• Hampel and Eichler et al. (2020)
• Kim et al. (2020)
• Kind et al. (2021)
• Marin et al. (2020)
• Morimoto et al. (2020)
• Otto et al. (2020)
• Sayin et al. (2019)
• Shiu et al. (2022)
• Taisz and Galili et al. (2022)
• Turner-Evans et al. (2020)
• Wang et al. (2020a, 2020b, 2020c)
• Zhao et al. (2023)
• Zheng et al. (2018, 2022)

Full references for specific neurons can be found on Virtual Fly Brain by searching for their skeleton ID (skid).

Dataset Contents

The viewer provides access to:

• Complete electron microscopy volume of an adult Drosophila melanogaster brain
• Manually traced neuron reconstructions from multiple research groups
• Synaptic connectivity information
• Associated metadata and annotations

Features

This CATMAID instance enables:

• Browser-based visualization of the serial section electron microscopy data
• Navigation through image stacks
• Viewing of neuron reconstructions
• Analysis of synaptic connectivity
• Data export functionality

Available Tools

• Tracing tool for examining reconstructions
• Neuron search interface with paper-based filtering
• Connectivity analysis tools
• Skeleton visualization options
• API access for programmatic data retrieval (documentation: https://catmaid.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api.html): https://fafb.catmaid.virtualflybrain.org/apis/

Citation Guidelines

When using this data, please cite:

1. The FAFB EM dataset: Zheng Z, et al. (2018) A Complete Electron Microscopy Volume of the Brain of Adult Drosophila melanogaster. Cell, 174(3), 730-743.e22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.06.019

2. The CATMAID platform: Saalfeld S, Cardona A, Hartenstein V, Tomančák P (2009) CATMAID: collaborative annotation toolkit for massive amounts of image data. Bioinformatics 25(15): 1984-1986. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btp266

3. The specific publication(s) associated with any neurons you analyze or reference (see Contributing Publications section)

Maintenance & Support

This resource is archived, hosted, and maintained by Virtual Fly Brain (VFB - https://virtualflybrain.org) as part of their commitment to preserving and making accessible critical Drosophila neuroscience data resources.