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BrainAligner: 3D registration atlases of Drosophila brains

2011; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 8; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1038/nmeth.1602

1548-7105

Hanchuan Peng, Phuong Chung, Fuhui Long, Lei Qu, Arnim Jenett, Andrew M. Seeds, Eugene W. Myers, J. Simpson,

Physiological and biochemical adaptations

Software for the automated and accurate registration of multiple images of Drosophila melanogaster brain is reported. It is used to build a preliminary atlas of gene expression in the fly brain. 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 2,954 registered brains containing 470 different expression patterns that cover all the major compartments of the fly brain.