PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Nikul H. Ukani
AU  - Chung-Heng Yeh
AU  - Adam Tomkins
AU  - Yiyin Zhou
AU  - Dorian Florescu
AU  - Carlos Luna Ortiz
AU  - Yu-Chi Huang
AU  - Cheng-Te Wang
AU  - Mehmet K. Turkcan
AU  - Tingkai Liu
AU  - Paul Richmond
AU  - Chung-Chuan Lo
AU  - Daniel Coca
AU  - Ann-Shyn Chiang
AU  - Aurel A. Lazar
TI  - The Fruit Fly Brain Observatory: From Structure to Function
AID  - 10.1101/580290
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 580290
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/18/580290.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/18/580290.full
AB  - The fruit fly is a key model organism for studying the activity of interconnected brain circuits. A large scattered global research community of neurobiologists and neurogeneticists, computational and theoretical neuroscientists, and computer scientists and engineers has been developing a vast trove of experimental and modeling data that has yet to be distilled into new knowledge and understanding of the functional logic of the brain. Developing open shared models, modelling tools and data repositories that can be accessed from anywhere in the world is the necessary engine for accelerating our understanding of how the brain works.To that end we developed the Fruit Fly Brain Observatory (FFBO), the next generation open-source platform to support open, collaborative Drosophila neuroscience research. FFBO provides a (i) hub for storing and integrating fruit fly brain research data from multiple data sources worldwide, (ii) unified repository of tools and methods to build, emulate and compare fruit fly brain models in health and disease, and (iii) an open framework for fruit fly brain data processing and model execution. FFBO provides access to application tools for visualizing, configuring, simulating and analyzing computational models of brain circuits of the (i) cell type map, (ii) connectome, (iii) synaptome, and (iv) activity map using intuitive queries in plain English. Tools are provided to extract the function inherent in these structural maps. All applications can be accessed with any modern browser.