Virtual Fly Brain. Cahir J O'Kane¹, David Osumi-Sutherland¹, Marta Costa¹, Nestor Milyaev², Gregory Jefferis³, J. Douglas Armstrong². 1) Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK; 2) Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK; 3) MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK.

   This is an exciting time for research into the function of neural circuits in Drosophila. We can now control neuronal activity and gene expression in single classes of neuron over specific time windows and to assay the consequences for behaviour and for neuronal activity. At the same time, advances in bulk data generation and image analysis are producing huge new bulk-data sets including large collections of single neuron images, lineage data, synaptic connectivity data and transgene expression data. This is on top of a large and ever growing literature. To exploit the full potential inherent in all this new data, researchers need to be able to rapidly search and query it to find what, if anything, is known about the neurons they identify, find potential circuit partners and track down transgenes that specifically target neurons of interest. Virtual Fly Brain (VFB) is the only project dedicated to providing this query functionality across multiple bulk data sets and the literature. VFB includes referenced descriptions of hundreds of neuron classes curated from the literature, along with query-able details of their innervation patterns, and thousands of query-able transgene expression patterns and phenotypes linked to FlyBase. Integrated bulk data-sets include expression patterns and images for over 3000 GAL4 lines from HHMI Janelia farm. They also include over 16000 3D single neuron images from FlyCircuit, many mapped to published neuron classes, and all clustered by similarity using a neuron blast system (developed by G.Jefferis). These clusters, which may represent novel neuron classes, are all viewable as rotatable 3D images. In the near future we will add query-able neuron lineage data and expand data on our site to cover the entire adult and larval nervous systems. In summary, Virtual Fly Brain is well on the way to becoming the major data-integration hub for Drosophila neuroanatomy.