Quantitative Analysis of Axonal Branch Dynamics in the Developing Nervous System.

ABSTRACT: Branching is an important mechanism by which axons navigate to their targets during neural development. For instance, in the developing zebrafish retinotectal system, selective branching plays a critical role during both initial pathfinding and subsequent arborisation once the target zone has been reached. Here we show how quantitative methods can help extract new information from time-lapse imaging about the nature of the underlying branch dynamics. First, we introduce Dynamic Time Warping to this domain as a method for automatically matching branches between frames, replacing the effort required for manual matching. Second, we model branch dynamics as a birth-death process, i.e. a special case of a continuous-time Markov process. This reveals that the birth rate for branches from zebrafi

SUBMITTER: Chalmers K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4801415 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature