Expedient Mechanosynthesis of N,N-Dialkyl Imidazoliums and Silver(I)-Carbene Complexes in a Ball-Mill.

The absence of solvent, associated with intensive mechanical agitation, allowed the first mechanosynthesis of high-value silver(I)-carbene complexes and the corresponding N,N-dialkylimidazolium precursors. This procedure gave outstanding results in terms of yield and reaction time, when compared to solution-based conditions previously described in literature, and was generalized to unprecedented compounds. Silver(I)-carbene complexes could either be obtained from N,N-dialkylimidazolium salts or directly from imidazole and alkyl halides in a one-pot two-step procedure without isolating the imidazolium intermediate. Additionally, an efficient one-pot three-step sequence, including imidazole alkylation, silver metalation, and transmetalation is reported.

CAVE: Connectome Annotation Versioning Engine.

Advances in Electron Microscopy, image segmentation and computational infrastructure have given rise to large-scale and richly annotated connectomic datasets which are increasingly shared across communities. To enable collaboration, users need to be able to concurrently create new annotations and correct errors in the automated segmentation by proofreading. In large datasets, every proofreading edit relabels cell identities of millions of voxels and thousands of annotations like synapses. For analysis, users require immediate and reproducible access to this constantly changing and expanding data landscape. Here, we present the Connectome Annotation Versioning Engine (CAVE), a computational infrastructure for immediate and reproducible connectome analysis in up-to petascale datasets (~1mm3) while proofreading and annotating is ongoing. For segmentation, CAVE provides a distributed proofreading infrastructure for continuous versioning of large reconstructions. Annotations in CAVE are defined by locations such that they can be quickly assigned to the underlying segment which enables fast analysis queries of CAVE's data for arbitrary time points. CAVE supports schematized, extensible annotations, so that researchers can readily design novel annotation types. CAVE is already used for many connectomics datasets, including the largest datasets available to date.