OpenWorm Journal Club - Comparing The Yin and Yang of Neurons
Channel: OpenWorm
Date: 2013-08-06

OpenWorm Journal Club - Comparing The Yin and Yang of Neurons

Unlike the yin-yang symbol with its two sides poised conveniently together, it hasn't always been easy to compare neurons side by side. While neurons come in many shapes, sizes and functionalities, the information about these characterizations is spread far and wide across thousands of journal articles. In swoops NeuroElectro like a caped crusader, providing a rich, public database where physiological properties have been compiled for the majority of mammalian neuron types using ninja-like data collection otherwise known as semi-automated literature text-mining. The web application at http://neuroelectro.org delivers a dynamic interface for visualizing and comparing physiological information across neuron types. At present, the database contains information from over 70 distinct neuron types from 300+ articles.

Please join Shreejoy Tripathy, one of the database architects, as he explains this fantastic resource and how it can be used by the OpenWorm community.