Development of the Drosophila central complex

This dataset consists of confocal stacks of the developing Drosophila brain, focussing on the central complex region. Throughout the dataset you can observe the central complex structure developing. All data is in .lsm format: I recommend that you download ImageJ (http://imagej.en.softonic.com/) to view the images.

 

Each image stack is of a different brain. Brains were extracted at 1-4 hour intervals throughout metamorphosis (~100 hours) and stained with an antibody for Echinoid + a fluorescent secondary antibody. Brains were imaged using a confocal microscope. 

 

The central complex (CX)

The adult Drosophila brain is divided into several neuropil masses (Power, 1943; Strausfeld, 1976) and is comprised of 100,000 neurons. The central complex (CX) is an intricate, symmetrical collection of neuropils located on the midline of the protocerebrum that has been observed in several insect species and implicated in several behaviors (reviewed in Homberg, 1987, 2008; Heisenberg,1994; Wessnitzer and Webb, 2006). In Drosophila the CX has been implicated in flight control (Ilius et al., 1994), multimodal information processing (Muller et al., 1997), coordination of motor behavior (Strauss and Heisenberg,1993; Martin et al., 1999; Strauss, 2002; Poeck et al.,2008), courtship behavior (Popov et al., 2003, 2004), visual pattern memory (Liu et al., 2006; Pan et al., 2009), olfactory memory (Wu et al., 2007), spatial orientation (Heinze and Homberg, 2007), and spatial orientation memory (Neuser et al., 2008).

 

The paper that accompanies this dataset is:

Young JM, Armstrong JD (2010) Building the central complex in Drosophila: the generation and development of distinct neural subsets. J Comp Neurol. 2010 May 1;518(9):1525-41.