MANC connectome

With about 23,000 neurons, 10 million pre-synaptic sites, and 74 million post-synaptic densities, the male adult nerve cord (MANC) connectome is a densely reconstructed map of synaptic connections in the fruit fly nerve cord – a structure analogous to the human spinal cord that controls most of the fly’s motor functions. This complete, extensively annotated connectome of the adult ventral nerve cord can be used to investigate any neural circuit of interest. It was produced through a collaboration between the FlyEM Project Team at HHMI Janelia, the Cambridge Connectomics Group, and Google Research.

The MANC is a milestone in connectomics.  It captures more synaptic connectivity than any other public connectome at the time of its release in June 2023.  It is the first complete nerve cord connectome and the first connectome of a bilaterally complete region of the central nervous system of an adult animal. For these reasons the MANC connectome will be of significant interest to computational neuroscientists, graph theorists and others using quantitative methods to investigate the nervous system. For neurobiologists the MANC dataset has been richly annotated with cell type information at different granularity and also benefits from neurotransmitter predictions across the dataset. This will immediately allow existing hypotheses to be refuted or supported and many new hypotheses to be generated.  This dataset also complements a partially proofread female VNC connectome (FANC) from Harvard, allowing for future detailed comparison of male and female premotor circuits.

Getting started

• Read the papers describing the MANC connectome, annotations and initial biological findings.
  • A Connectome of the Male Drosophila Ventral Nerve Cord
  • Systematic annotation of a complete adult male Drosophila nerve cord connectome reveals principles of functional organisation
  • Transforming descending input into behavior:  
    The organization of premotor circuits in the Drosophila Male Adult Nerve Cord connectome
• Explore the dataset using neuPrint: an analysis ecosystem for exploring connectomes.
  • See the introductory video as well as more detailed documentation.
  • Programmatic access via neuprint-python and neuprintr
  • MANC-specific utilities can be found in the natverse malevnc package.
• View data in neuroglancer
  • EM and segmentation layers are hosted as neuroglancer "precomputed" volumes.
  • Downloading subvolumes is possible via TensorStore or cloud-volume
• Check out MANC in clio.janelia.org
  • Create your own annotations
  • Try the image search feature to find ultrastructure motifs
  • Submit proofreading fixes
• Find LM matches to your favorite MANC neurons using NeuronBridge!
  • NeuronBridge matches against the FlyLight catalogue, but it also allows you to upload your own LM images!
  • Registration transforms from MANC (EM) to JRC 2018 VNC template (LM) can be found here.
• The complete MANC connectome can be downloaded as flat files from this public google bucket.
• If you have questions, problems, and comments, please post on relevant software github pages or in the neuPrint user group.
• The MANC is licensed under CC-BY.

Acknowledgements

Funding for the MANC project was provided by HHMI, Wellcome Trust, University of Cambridge, Google Research, and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.