Volume electron microscopy for neuronal circuit reconstruction.

By Kevin L. Briggman, Davi D. Bock. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2012

356 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The last decade has seen a rapid increase in the number of tools to acquire volume electron microscopy (EM) data. Several new scanning EM (SEM) imaging methods have emerged, and classical transmission EM (TEM) methods are being scaled up and automated. Here we summarize the new methods for acquiring large EM volumes, and discuss the tradeoffs in terms of resolution, acquisition speed, and reliability. We then assess each method's applicability to the problem of reconstructing anatomical connectivity between neurons, considering both the current capabilities and future prospects of the method. Finally, we argue that neuronal 'wiring diagrams' are likely necessary, but not sufficient, to understand the operation of most neuronal circuits: volume EM imaging will likely find its best application in combination with other methods in neuroscience, such as molecular biology, optogenetics, and physiology.

Subfields: Biophysics, Cognitive Neuroscience, Structural Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/989ede2d7923c453cb77ecae30fb56d6b53ba16b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biophysics

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Structural Biology

Citations in the corpus

A Complete Electron Microscopy Volume of the Brain of Adult Drosophila melanogaster (2017, methodology): “Data rates for FIB-SEM, SBEM, and ATUM-SEM were calculated from published values (Briggman and Bock, 2012; Kasthuri et al., 2015).”
DeepEM3D: approaching human‐level performance on 3D anisotropic EM image segmentation (2017, background): “The EM scanning can achieve very high resolutions of the surface (XY-axes) of each slice, while slicing resolutions in the Z-direction is generally 10 times lower (Briggman and Bock, 2012), which results in anisotropic 3D image stacks.”
NEUROMODULATION OF NEURONAL CIRCUITS: BACK TO THE FUTURE (2012, background): “…belief that a connectivity diagram would be sufficient to bring understanding of how a circuit worked and some of the more lofty justifications made for the recent attempts to establish connectomes using anatomical methods (Briggman and Bock, 2012; Briggman and Denk, 2006; Briggman et al., 2011).”
Connectomic reconstruction of the inner plexiform layer in the mouse retina (2013, methodology): “Advances in volume electron microscopy technology 18 now make it possible to acquire volumes with a lateral extent of at least 500 m m.”
TrakEM2 Software for Neural Circuit Reconstruction (2012, background): “There is a growing consensus that detailed volumetric reconstructions of thousands of neurons in millimeter-scale blocks of tissue are necessary for understanding neuronal circuits [1,2].”