Ito's brain sections


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Anatomia Cerebri Insecti: Drosophila Brain Serial Sections

Scanned photographs of serial sections of wild-type adult fly brains. In three directions (frontal, horizontal, and sagittal). Annotated with names of major brain structures. 6-bit GIF format (about 6 MB in total).

Drosophila is a good model system for studying various aspects of brain development and brain function. Unfortunately, however, no convenient atlas has been published for the brain of the fruit fly. Although such an atlas would be extremely helpful, publishing one is of course not an easy task. This situation makes it difficult for novice people to quickly learn the complicated structure of the fly brain.

When I started working with Drosophila, I made serial sections of wild-type fly heads in three directions and have used the pictures privately for a reference purpose. Recently I scanned the pictures so that I can carry and see the images with my laptop computer (which was stolen after that, though...). Since such pictures would also be helpful for other fellow Drosophila researchers, I added a few annotations and decided to make them publicly available. The Flybase kindly allowed the to put the data into one of its directory.

This is by no means a real atlas, but it would be helpful as a quick reference as well as for educational purpose. This is also an exploration to see how one can share information using electronic media. For this matter it is an experimental version. Since the original pictures were not prepared for serious publication, the sections were not carefully aligned. The scanning resolution was kept minimum to keep the data size relatively small, thus saving the hard disk space and the network traffic. Though it was possible to make a better version with precisely aligned high-resolution images and detailed documents, I was not sure whether it is worth the extra effort.

I would appreciate any comments and suggestions, negative or positive, about this version. Please contact me if you have any idea to make it more useful.

General notes:

1.The following files are provided in this version.