Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Virginia, USA.
Nat Methods. 2011 Jun;8(6):493-500. doi: 10.1038/nmeth.1602. Epub 2011 May 1.
Analyzing Drosophila melanogaster neural expression patterns in thousands of three-dimensional image stacks of individual brains requires registering them into a canonical framework based on a fiducial reference of neuropil morphology. Given a target brain labeled with predefined landmarks, the BrainAligner program automatically finds the corresponding landmarks in a subject brain and maps it to the coordinate system of the target brain via a deformable warp. Using a neuropil marker (the antibody nc82) as a reference of the brain morphology and a target brain that is itself a statistical average of data for 295 brains, we achieved a registration accuracy of 2 μm on average, permitting assessment of stereotypy, potential connectivity and functional mapping of the adult fruit fly brain. We used BrainAligner to generate an image pattern atlas of 2954 registered brains containing 470 different expression patterns that cover all the major compartments of the fly brain.
分析果蝇的神经表达模式需要将数千张个体大脑的三维图像堆栈注册到基于神经突形态学基准参考的规范框架中。给定一个用预定义地标标记的目标大脑，BrainAligner 程序会自动在主体大脑中找到相应的地标，并通过可变形变形将其映射到目标大脑的坐标系中。使用神经突标记物（抗体 nc82）作为大脑形态的参考，以及一个本身是 295 个大脑数据的统计平均值的目标大脑，我们实现了平均 2 微米的注册精度，从而可以评估成年果蝇大脑的刻板印象、潜在连接和功能映射。我们使用 BrainAligner 生成了一个包含 470 种不同表达模式的 2954 个注册大脑的图像模式图谱，这些模式涵盖了果蝇大脑的所有主要区域。
