Project manager Dr. Katja Bühler talks about the project to generate a standard brain of the Drosophila Melanogaster larva. The contribution of her Biomedical Image Informatics team is the processing, organization and visualization of the processed data in an open access database.
Many basic biological processes are common to many organisms, but are particularly easy to observe in fruit flies. The fruit fly has only four pairs of chromosomes, whereas humans have 23 and about 70% of the genetic material is identical. The findings that can be obtained with the fly are in many cases also relevant for humans. The project "The Larval 4D Standard Brain of Drosophila Melanogaster on a Single Cell Level" is a collaboration between Prof. Andreas Thum (University of Leipzig), Prof. Dorit Merhof (RWTH Aachen), Prof. Jim Truman (HHMI) and Prof. Volker Hartenstein (UCLA) and Katja Bühler (VRVis). From many thousands of pictures of individual fly larvae a standard brain or standard nervous system was generated by fusing these images and matching them as well as possible. Specifically, these images were deformed until they fit together and a standard template could be developed.