A Science Game

Two thousand online gamers in 100 countries have helped biologists to draw a 3D image of the tangle of different nerve fibres (shown in different colours) in the retina of mouse eye. Each gamer received a raw 3D image made up of electron microscope scans of a small volume of the retina, and earned points by highlighting speedily and accurately the route individual nerve fibres took, starting at the nerve's hub (coloured blobs). Crowdsourcing the painstaking job saved the researchers years of drudgery and shed light on a 50-year-old mystery about how retinal cells detect the direction of movement. The 3D image revealed an elaborate layout that allows two types of retinal cells, the spoke-hub-shaped starburst amacrine cell and bipolar cells, to collaborate so that a moving image triggers an electric signal exclusively when the motion direction is aligned with the axis of one of the spokes of the cell.

Written by Tristan Farrow

Tristan Farrow

Writer

British Science Association Media Fellow. He holds a degree in quantum physics from the University of Cambridge and a Research Fellowship in quantum effects in biology.

• Image by H. Sebastian Seung and colleagues
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• Copyright held by Nature Publishing Group
• Research published in Nature, May 2014