Nestor Timonidis, Mario Rubio-Teves, Carmen Alonso-Martínez, Rembrandt Bakker, María García-Amado, Paul Tiesinga, Francisco Clascá
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Current mesoscale connectivity atlases provide limited information about the organization of thalamocortical projections in the mouse brain. Labeling the projections of spatially restricted neuron populations in thalamus can provide a functionally relevant level of connectomic analysis, but these need to be integrated within the same common reference space. Here, we present a pipeline for the segmentation, registration, integration and analysis of multiple tract-tracing experiments. The key difference with other workflows is that the data is transformed to fit the reference template. As a test-case, we investigated the axonal projections and intranuclear arrangement of seven neuronal populations of the ventral posteromedial nucleus of the thalamus (VPM), which we labeled with an anterograde tracer. Their soma positions corresponded, from dorsal to ventral, to cortical representations of the whiskers, nose and mouth. They strongly targeted layer 4, with the majority exclusively targeting one cortical area and the ones in ventrolateral VPM branching to multiple somatosensory areas. We found that our experiments were more topographically precise than similar experiments from the Allen Institute and projections to the primary somatosensory area were in agreement with single-neuron morphological reconstructions from publicly available databases. This pilot study sets the basis for a shared virtual connectivity atlas that could be enriched with additional data for studying the topographical organization of different thalamic nuclei. The pipeline is accessible with only minimal programming skills via a Jupyter Notebook, and offers multiple visualization tools such as cortical flatmaps, subcortical plots and 3D renderings and can be used with custom anatomical delineations.
期刊介绍:
Neuroinformatics publishes original articles and reviews with an emphasis on data structure and software tools related to analysis, modeling, integration, and sharing in all areas of neuroscience research. The editors particularly invite contributions on: (1) Theory and methodology, including discussions on ontologies, modeling approaches, database design, and meta-analyses; (2) Descriptions of developed databases and software tools, and of the methods for their distribution; (3) Relevant experimental results, such as reports accompanie by the release of massive data sets; (4) Computational simulations of models integrating and organizing complex data; and (5) Neuroengineering approaches, including hardware, robotics, and information theory studies.