An integrated micro- and macroarchitectural analysis of the Drosophila brain by computer-assisted serial section electron microscopy.

ABSTRACT: The analysis of microcircuitry (the connectivity at the level of individual neuronal processes and synapses), which is indispensable for our understanding of brain function, is based on serial transmission electron microscopy (TEM) or one of its modern variants. Due to technical limitations, most previous studies that used serial TEM recorded relatively small stacks of individual neurons. As a result, our knowledge of microcircuitry in any nervous system is very limited. We applied the software package TrakEM2 to reconstruct neuronal microcircuitry from TEM sections of a small brain, the early larval brain of Drosophila melanogaster. TrakEM2 enables us to embed the analysis of the TEM image volumes at the microcircuit level into a light microscopically derived neuro-anatomical framework, b

SUBMITTER: Cardona A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2950124 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature