The fly connectome reveals a path to the effectome.

ABSTRACT: A goal of neuroscience is to obtain a causal model of the nervous system. The recently reported whole-brain fly connectome^1-3 specifies the synaptic paths by which neurons can affect each other, but not how strongly they do affect each other in vivo. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a combined experimental and statistical strategy for efficiently learning a causal model of the fly brain, which we refer to as the 'effectome'. Specifically, we propose an estimator for a linear dynamical model of the fly brain that uses stochastic optogenetic perturbation data to estimate causal effects and the connectome as a prior to greatly improve estimation efficiency. We validate our estimator in connectome-based linear simulations and show that it recovers a linear approximation to

SUBMITTER: Pospisil DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11446844 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature