At the Rancz Lab (the Francis Crick Institute, London, UK), I performed a set of whole-brain rabies tracing experiments. This technique labels all presynaptic input cells (red dots in the example video) to starter cells in layer 5 visual cortex. Afterwards, samples were imaged under serial two-photon tomography and coordinates of the labelled cells were quantified with a machine-learning pipeline.

With this dataset, we can compare the whole-brain input maps to different cell types and to cells in different brain areas. We can also quantify organisational rules governing the input connectivity with the large number of samples we collected.

This story is in development currently. Stay tuned.

Example brain sample is rendered using open source Brainrender package.