Eyewire and The Human Genome Project

#1

Me pregunto si “Eyewire” será útil para conocer el funcionamiento de la retina o si, por el contrario, cuando tengamos un número considerable de neuronas coloreadas será todo una maraña de neuronas y ramificaciones inabarcables para su análisis y extraer conclusiones. En este último sentido me recuerda al Proyecto Genoma Humano, en el que tardaron 13 años en secuenciar todo un genoma pensando que iban a descifrar los secretos del ADN y cuando acabaron lo que tenían era una enorme lista de secuencia de nucleótidos inabarcable y que no sabían qué significaba. Con el paso de los años, además, se consiguieron los medios tecnológicos para secuenciar el ADN en muy poco tiempo (no sé exactamente cuánto) y a un precio que podríamos permitirnos cualquiera de nosotros. Menudo trabajo se dieron y tras unos años se ha logrado hacer tan fácil, barato y rápido.

I wonder if “Eyerwire” will be useful to know how retina works or, instead of it, when we reach a big amount of coloured neurons, it will be a tangled mess of neurons and ramifications which is too vast to be analyzed and to get conclusions. In this last sense, “Eyerwire” reminds me to the Human Gemone Project, which took a lot of work and 13 years to get the sequence of a complete human genoma. Scientits thought that they would discover all the secrets of DNA when they got the sequence, but, instead of it, when they reached the complete sequence, they just had a huge list of nucleotides which was too vast and, besides, they didn’t know what they mean. Furthermore, after several years, the technological development let us get the complete sequence of a human genoma taking little time (I don’t know exactly how much time) and with a price that most of us could pay. The scientits spend many time and work, and after a few years, the sequence can be got in a fast, easy and cheap way.

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#2

Hi JGonzG,

First, thank you for translating your message into English. I apologize, but my Spanish is very limited so I’ll have to respond in English.

The neurons we’ve built so far in Eyewire have proven to be useful in better understanding how the retina works and we’ve published a few papers on it. You can read about our first paper published in Nature here. There are more scientific papers from our lab here: http://seunglab.org/publications/. There are different types of complex brain “mapping” out there in addition to ours. In fact, we compare histological/flourescent imaging from other scientists to Eyewire’s structural 3D reconstructions.

Mapping the brain is quite a large and ambitious project. There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain. Eyewire’s retinal dataset contains about 10,000 neurons. We’ve mapped more than 1,500 neurons in the Eyewire dataset. Eyewire’s neurons are just a tiny percent of the total brain. We know that we need computers to do most of the reconstruction and image analysis for the brain. Part of the Eyewire project is gathering data to train the AI. We take Eyewire gameplay tracing data from players like you and use machine learning to teach the computer AI how to trace neurons more accurately. Eyewire players are contributing to the technological development that will eventually make Eyewire no longer necessary.

Currently, the AI is not good enough to trace neurons accurately on it’s own. We need to gather more training material and that’s why players like you are important.

Best,
M.

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