The retina is one of the best systems for understanding how neural circuits perform computations. Until now, retinal connectomics datasets have been too small to capture rare cell types and neurons with large dendritic arbors. Eyewire II changes that.

If you’re a citizen scientist, you can learn more about Eyewire II during an upcoming Zoom intro on June 15 at 11 am US ET. RSVP here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeeGeYyfQFVuSmFAmqu10tWHS2JgZg_pcE5GorPcr4uf1LQvQ/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=111790801286012681940

Eyewire II is 10x larger than EyeWire I and 100x larger than e2006 dataset.

First, we need to catalogue those cells into types to get to a parts list of the circuits they form. Often, we can tell the type of a cell by its shape. But with this many cells, sorting them by hand doesn't scale. So we type them automatically, using machine learning. Fig 3:

This is just the beginning. We're excited to see the discoveries that emerge from Eyewire II and to continue building this platform together with the retina community. See you at #FASEB, and stay tuned for our next Eyewire II Town Hall in September!

After 1 year of proofreading by a community of over 30 labs, Eyewire II includes: • >8,000 bipolar cells • >13,000 amacrine cells • >4,000 retinal ganglion cells …and that is only 25% of all expected neurons in the data!

But how do these cell types connect? Synapse prediction is ongoing, but Eyewire II already includes automatic detection of synaptic ribbons, the hallmark of retinal excitatory synapses. We auto-detected ~6.5 million ribbons so far!

Eyewire II continues the tradition of public participation in connectomics: citizen scientists helped proofread and annotate neurons alongside researchers and specialists - shoutout to Nikitas Serafetinidis (named coauthor on the paper) and to all other volunteers contributing!

New here? Check out our website for

⚒️ Tools - https://eyewire.ai/tools - from command line tools to interactive data explorers 🦠 Cells - https://eyewire.ai/cells - direct links to all cells identified so far 🧭 Guides - https://eyewire.ai/guides - tutorials for a smooth start

Eyewire II is more than a dataset, it’s a community! Already now, >80 researchers from >30 labs are part of the Eyewire II, contributing their expertise to the consortium work. Meet them here https://eyewire.ai/consortium Join us today! https://eyewire.ai/ew2_access

We built a human-in-the-loop approach: the model proposes types, human experts refine and correct. As a proof of principle, we applied it to bipolar cells and recovered all 15 known types. See those and more types in our gallery 👇 https://eyewire.ai/gallery

Thanks to our funders, without whom this project would not be possible! @RPB_org @NIH @USBrainAlliance @ERC_Research Eyewire is brought to you by a core team of labs at @uni_tue @NorthwesternU @PrincetonNeuro

@eye_wire 😍