Topic: data acquisition

The "mind of the worm", the first electron microscopy-based connectome of C. elegans, was an early sign of where connectomics is headed, followed by a long time of little progress in a field held back by the immense manual effort required for data acquisition and analysis. This changed over the last few years with several technological breakthroughs, which allowed increases in data set sizes by several orders of magnitude. Brain tissue can now be imaged in 3D up to a millimeter in size at nanometer resolution, revealing tissue features from synapses to the mitochondria of all contained cells.