Abstract
This work presents PyramidalExplorer, a new tool to interactively explore and reveal the detailed organization of the microanatomy of pyramidal neurons with functionally related models. It consists of a set of functionalities that allow possible regional differences in the pyramidal cell architecture to be interactively discovered by combining quantitative morphological information about the structure of the cell with implemented functional models. The key contribution of this tool is the morpho-functional oriented design that allows the user to navigate within the 3D dataset, filter and perform Content-Based Retrieval operations. As a case study, we present a human pyramidal neuron with over 9000 dendritic spines in its apical and basal dendritic trees. Using PyramidalExplorer, we were able to find unexpected differential morphological attributes of dendritic spines in particular compartments of the neuron, revealing new aspects of the morpho-functional organization of the pyramidal neuron.
Highlights
Over recent years, the field of neuroanatomy has evolved considerably, thanks to the use of classical techniques and the introduction of new procedures and powerful techniques to examine the organization of the nervous system
The input data consist of 3D reconstructed apical and basal arbors from a human pyramidal neuron that was intracellularly injected with Lucifer Yellow (LY) in layer III of the human cingulate cortex from a 40-year-old human male obtained at autopsy (2–3 h post-mortem)
The injected cell was fully imaged at high magnification using tile scan mode in a Leica TCS 4D confocal scanning laser attached to a Leitz DMIRB fluorescence microscope (Figure 1)
Summary
The field of neuroanatomy has evolved considerably, thanks to the use of classical techniques and the introduction of new procedures and powerful techniques to examine the organization of the nervous system (reviewed in DeFelipe, 2002, 2010). In the case of PyramidalExplorer, we explore possible regional differences in the pyramidal cell architecture by combining quantitative morphological information about the structure of the cell with implemented functional models. The present application allows the input of different cell types, species and kinds of data (including electron microscopic reconstructions), thereby broadening the usage of the tool (see methods and results for further details).
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