Lei Qu

TL;DR: The utility of 7,000 transgenic lines of Drosophila melanogaster for identifying novel neuronal cell types, revealing brain asymmetry, and describing the nature and extent of neuronal shape stereotypy is illustrated.

TL;DR: This study reveals a unified molecular genetic landscape of cortical cell types that congruently integrates their transcriptome, open chromatin and DNA methylation maps, and establishes a unified and mechanistic framework of neuronal cell type organization that integrates multi-layered molecular genetic and spatial information with multi-faceted phenotypic properties.

TL;DR: Analyzing Drosophila melanogaster neural expression patterns in thousands of three-dimensional image stacks of individual brains requires registering them into a canonical framework based on a fiducial reference of neuropil morphology, which permits assessment of stereotypy, potential connectivity and functional mapping of the adult fruit fly brain.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors systematically examined complete single-neuron morphologies on a brain-wide scale, established a pipeline encompassing sparse labeling, whole-brain imaging, reconstruction, registration and analysis, and identified 11 major projection neuron types with distinct morphological features and corresponding transcriptomic identities.

TL;DR: The BlastNeuron approach was able to accurately and efficiently retrieve morphologically and functionally similar neuron structures from large morphology database, identify the local common structures, and find clusters of neurons that share similarities in both morphology and molecular profiles.