Your Future Self Will Thank You | Connectomics Part II

We’re back with Part II of our two-part series on Connectomics! 

In part one we speculated on the legal and ethical implications of emerging technologies in the connectomics field. In part two, we don our lab coats and take a deep dive into the latest research tools, from fixation protocols for the preservation of neural tissue, to multimodal imaging techniques, to the machine intelligence designed to interpret massive data sets and reconstruct the vast neural circuits that make up the connectome. 

Our guests are: 

• Kenneth Hayworth, PhD, President and Co-Founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation, Senior Scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC)
• Robert McIntyre, CEO at Nectome
• Jeremy Maitin-Shepard, PhD, Software Engineer–Connectomics at Google

In this episode, Ken and Robert from part one return to the pub, and we are also joined by Jeremy Maitin-Shepard, an engineer and researcher at Google, who shares insights into some of the machine intelligence modalities being used to decode previously uncharted neural networks. Check out Jeremy’s recent paper on BioRxiv, as well as his published work at Google. 

If you missed part one, you can listen and explore the show notes here. Cheers!

Show Notes: 

0:00 | Intro

1:03 | Kenneth Hayworth, PhD

1:12 | Robert McKintyre, CEO, Nectome

1:17 | Jeremy Maitin-Shepard, PhD

1:51 | Setting the record straight 

3:09 | The nucleotide sequence of bacteriophage φX174

4:22 | Frozen Zoo at San Diego Zoo

12:01| Glutaraldehyde and reduction techniques for immunolabeling 

17:39 | SWITCH Framework

19:14 | Population Responses in V1 Encode Different Figures by Response Amplitude 

Enhanced mirror neuron network activity and effective connectivity during live interaction among female subjects 

Permeabilization-free en bloc immunohistochemistry for correlative microscopy 

19:57 | Synaptic Signaling in Learning and Memory 

Structure and function of a neocortical synapse 

Engineering a memory with LTD and LTP 

Synapse-specific representation of the identity of overlapping memory engrams 

20:28 |