If you're a citizen scientist: Thank you! Your contributions have been invaluable to advancing our understanding of neural circuits and brain function.
Citizen science at the Seung Lab centers on mapping and identifying neurons across several public datasets. These datasets share a common visualization and annotation environment: Neuroglancer. A complete Neuroglancer user guide is available here: Neuroglancer 101. New here? Jump to the resources below to get started.
Three projects are actively recruiting citizen scientists right now. Learn the tools, pass the challenge, claim a neuron, and help map the brain.
The next‑generation EyeWire, mapping thousands of neurons in the mouse retina, the light‑sensing tissue at the back of the eye where vision begins. Here you own your cell start to finish: no consensus committee, you're its first and last check.
The brain's map of space. Cells here fire in a hexagonal grid as an animal moves around a room, and nobody yet knows how that grid is built, because the leading explanations disagree about what the wiring should look like. This is the newest dataset and the first one citizen scientists are testing.
The fruit fly's complete central nervous system, brain and ventral nerve cord together, well over 100,000 neurons, so you can trace a signal all the way from sensing to movement. Request access, join #banc‑citsci, and start splitting and merging.
Stay in the loop
New datasets, events, and fresh ways to help map the brain, straight to your inbox. We'll never share your information.
Nurro will keep you posted. Welcome to the quest.
Open-access connectomes you can browse, search, and build on.
The first complete wiring diagram of an adult fruit fly brain, imaged with electron microscopy. In about 140,000 neurons the fly brain runs vision, smell, navigation, learning and memory. Small enough to map completely, complex enough to reveal how brains compute.
The original brain‑mapping game. Players reconstructed neurons in the mouse retina, the eye's light‑sensing tissue, and helped reveal how it detects motion, mapping hundreds of neurons across some 47 retinal cell types.
A cubic millimeter of mouse visual cortex, the region that makes sense of what the eyes see, reconstructed in full and paired with recordings of the very same neurons in action. About 200,000 cells and 523 million synapses, linking wiring to activity.
The CA3 region of the mouse hippocampus, the brain area most critical for learning and memory, where new memories are formed and recalled. A large, growing reconstruction that the community proofreads and annotates cell by cell.
New to connectomics, or back for another proofreading session? Here's everything you need to get started, sharpen your skills, and connect with the community.
Ask questions, share finds, and proofread alongside researchers and fellow citizen scientists in the community forum.
Every dataset is viewed and edited in Neuroglancer / Spelunker. Our step‑by‑step guides walk you through it, click by click.
Choose a project above, a fly brain, a mouse retina, or a slice of hippocampus, and follow its link to sign up.
Pick a project and get your account set up.
The shared viewer every dataset uses.
You're never proofreading alone.
Background reading and reference material.
Prefer to watch someone do it first?
Three interactive lessons that take students inside a real connectome, built for high school and college classrooms.