Nils Eckstein, Alexander Shakeel Bates, Andrew Champion, Michelle Du, Yijie Yin, Philipp Schlegel, Alicia Kun-Yang Lu, Thomson Rymer, Samantha Finley-May, Tyler Paterson, Ruchi Parekh, Sven Dorkenwald, Arie Matsliah, Szi-Chieh Yu, Claire McKellar, Amy Sterling, Katharina Eichler, Marta Costa, Sebastian Seung, Mala Murthy, Volker Hartenstein, Gregory S X E Jefferis, Jan Funke
High-resolution electron microscopy of nervous systems has enabled the reconstruction of synaptic connectomes. However, we do not know the synaptic sign for each connection (i.e., whether a connection is excitatory or inhibitory), which is implied by the released transmitter. We demonstrate that artificial neural networks can predict transmitter types for presynapses from electron micrographs: a network trained to predict six transmitters (acetylcholine, glutamate, GABA, serotonin, dopamine, octopamine) achieves an accuracy of 87% for individual synapses, 94% for neurons, and 91% for known cell types across a D...
May 9, 2024: Cell