High-throughput dual-colour precision imaging for brain-wide connectome with cytoarchitectonic landmarks at the cellular level

By H. Gong, Dongli Xu, Jing Yuan, Xiangning Li, Congdi Guo, Jie Peng, Yuxin Li, L. Schwarz, Anan Li, Bihe Hu and 8 more. Nature Communications, 2016

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The precise annotation and accurate identification of neural structures are prerequisites for studying mammalian brain function. The orientation of neurons and neural circuits is usually determined by mapping brain images to coarse axial-sampling planar reference atlases. However, individual differences at the cellular level likely lead to position errors and an inability to orient neural projections at single-cell resolution. Here, we present a high-throughput precision imaging method that can acquire a co-localized brain-wide data set of both fluorescent-labelled neurons and counterstained cell bodies at a voxel size of 0.32 × 0.32 × 2.0 μm in 3 days for a single mouse brain. We acquire mouse whole-brain imaging data sets of multiple types of neurons and projections with anatomical annotation at single-neuron resolution. The results show that the simultaneous acquisition of labelled neural structures and cytoarchitecture reference in the same brain greatly facilitates precise tracing of long-range projections and accurate locating of nuclei. High-throughput imaging methods for brain-wide connectome mapping with precise location reference have been lacking. Here authors report a method that allows simultaneous acquisition of fluorescently labelled neurons and cytoarchitectural landmarks in the same mouse brain at the single-cell resolution.

Subfields: Biophysics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f698d4e34b4cadbff6ee97ba78758db665904222