Rosetta Brains: A Strategy for Molecularly-Annotated Connectomics

TL;DR

This paper introduces FISSEQ-BOINC, a novel neural connectomics method that uses fluorescent in situ sequencing to map whole mammalian brain connectomes with detailed molecular information.

Contribution

It presents a new strategy combining FISSEQ with connectomics, offering a potentially scalable way to produce molecularly-annotated brain connectomes.

Findings

FISSEQ-BOINC differs from traditional BOINC by using in situ sequencing.

It could enable scalable mapping of entire mammalian brains.

Provides rich molecular annotations alongside connectome data.

Abstract

We propose a neural connectomics strategy called Fluorescent In-Situ Sequencing of Barcoded Individual Neuronal Connections (FISSEQ-BOINC), leveraging fluorescent in situ nucleic acid sequencing in fixed tissue (FISSEQ). FISSEQ-BOINC exhibits different properties from BOINC, which relies on bulk nucleic acid sequencing. FISSEQ-BOINC could become a scalable approach for mapping whole-mammalian-brain connectomes with rich molecular annotations.