NWB conversions for five fly labs on a BRAIN Initiative U01 studying multisensory flight control in Drosophila
The Drosophila Sensation U01 (U01NS131438) is a BRAIN Initiative exploratory team-research award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to Cornell University, with Itai Cohen as contact principal investigator. Its project period began in May 2023 and runs through April 2027. The team studies how flies integrate visual, wind, and gyroscopic information to steer in flight, combining two-photon calcium imaging, muscle imaging, whole-cell patch clamp, high-speed behavioral analysis, and optogenetics with control-theoretic models. From August 2024 we worked with five fly labs on the project to convert their data to NWB.
We wrote the conversions in one shared repository, with custom interfaces for each lab’s acquisition files. The data span two-photon imaging from Thorlabs and ScanImage microscopes, whole-cell patch clamp recordings with seal tests, high-speed video with DeepLabCut pose estimation, wingbeat signals recorded alongside visual, airflow, and optogenetic stimuli, and confocal images. Several labs recorded camera and imaging frame triggers on a shared acquisition clock, and we used these to place video, imaging, and behavior on one timeline. During the project we added support for Thorlabs ThorImageLS data to ROIExtractors and NeuroConv. The free-flight data behind Ludlow et al., “A multi-muscular, redundant strategy for free-flight roll stability,” are published on the DANDI Archive as Dandiset 001851, with 866 NWB files from 797 flies.
NWB conversions under this project
5 labs
Marie Suver
Vanderbilt University
Developed NWB conversion tools for the Suver lab's research on flight control and sensory integration in Drosophila. The pipeline standardizes whole-cell patch clamp recordings with seal tests, multi-camera video with DeepLabCut tracking, and tachometer, puffer, and photodiode signals from airflow and optic flow behavioral experiments.
Sung Soo Kim
University of California, Santa Barbara
Developed NWB conversion tools for the Kim lab's research on Drosophila visual processing. The pipeline standardizes two-photon imaging data, behavioral videos, and visual stimulus information. These tools integrate synchronization signals from MATLAB files and fluorescence traces from segmented regions of interest, facilitating analysis of neural responses to visual stimuli in relation to behavioral outputs.
Bradley Dickerson
Princeton University
Developed NWB conversion tools for the Dickerson lab's research on Drosophila sensory processing. The pipeline standardizes two-photon imaging of GCaMP7f and tdTomato from a Thorlabs microscope run by ThorImageLS, together with wingbeat amplitude and visual stimulus signals recorded by ThorSync.
Itai Cohen
Cornell University
Developed NWB conversion tools for the Cohen lab's free-flight optogenetics experiments in Drosophila. The pipeline standardizes wing and body angles reconstructed from high-speed video, LED stimulation, and driver and effector line metadata, along with Zeiss confocal images used to confirm the optogenetic lines.
Jessica Fox
Case Western Reserve University
Developed NWB conversion tools for the Fox lab's research on flight control and sensory integration in Drosophila. The pipeline standardizes high-speed video from three cameras, DeepLabCut tracking of the antennae and a haltere, and wingbeat amplitude, frequency, and photodiode signals, aligned using camera triggers recorded in the acquisition file.