Abstract
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is an important model organism for neuroscience with a wide array of genetic tools that enable the mapping of individual neurons and neural subtypes. Brain templates are essential for comparative biological studies because they enable analyzing many individuals in a common reference space. Several central brain templates exist for Drosophila, but every one is either biased, uses sub-optimal tissue preparation, is imaged at low resolution, or does not account for artifacts. No publicly available Drosophila ventral nerve cord template currently exists. In this work, we created high-resolution templates of the Drosophila brain and ventral nerve cord using the best-available technologies for imaging, artifact correction, stitching, and template construction using groupwise registration. We evaluated our central brain template against the four most competitive, publicly available brain templates and demonstrate that ours enables more accurate registration with fewer local deformations in shorter time.
Highlights
Introduction and related workCanonical templates of stereotypical anatomy are vital in inter-subject biological studies
We show that Drosophila brain samples register significantly better, faster, and with less local deformation to our JRC 2018 template than to any prior template, enabling more accurate comparison studies than were previously possible
We see that the unisex templates are generally more blurry than the single sex templates, likely because the unisex templates include inter-sex variation in addition to inter-individual variation. This is more pronounced for the ventral nerve cord (VNC) than for the central brain
Summary
Canonical templates (or “atlases”) of stereotypical anatomy are vital in inter-subject biological studies. For a template space to be useful, it must be possible to reliably find spatial transformations between individual subjects and that template. The transformation must be capable of expressing the biological variability so that stereotypical anatomical features of many transformed subjects are well aligned in template space. This serves to normalize for “irrelevant” sources of variability while comparing across a population. Templates used simple affine spatial transformations [1], for which identifying a small number of stereotypical landmarks was sufficient. Modern templates consist of a representative digital image of the anatomy and imaging
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