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so I just realized I forgot to #skeetprint my Contactomes paper... (is that what we're calling it?) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @kordinglab.bsky.social @dacolon.bsky.social smithneurallab.weebly.com @jhuapl.bsky.social #academicsky #preprint #neuroscience

TLDR: We know neurons communicate at synapses. But they also talk in a bunch of other ways! diffusion, glial interactions, ephaptic coupling, neuropeptides (cc @lidia-ripolls.bsky.social!) The list is long. probably longer than we know :) So let's make a map of all physical contact between neurons!

I first got excited about this ~8y ago when I started seeing a pattern in #microns and other datasets at bossdb.org @alleninstitute.org @bcmhouston.bsky.social @princeton.edu @mit.edu Usually neuron cell bodies are spread out... But every so often, you get what I call "cuddle buddies". wtf?

Our first result was super obvious: in mice, CONTACT networks (the #contactome) are 5-10 times as dense as the synaptic connectome.

(That also presents the engineering challenge and the reason these analyses aren't commonplace: the resulting network is 100s of GB, before you even _think_ about the ~petabytes of underlying data to generate that.)

It also turns out that different cell types have different "fingerprints" of their volume to surface-area relationships. Unsurprisingly, you can immediately tell who's a neuron and who's glia (green = glia, blue = neuron), and in fact different cell types even have their own "sub-fingerprint"!