Reconstruction of the neuromuscular junction connectome
Open Access
- 1 June 2010
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in Bioinformatics
- Vol. 26 (12), i64-i70
- https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btq179
Abstract
Motivation: Unraveling the structure and behavior of the brain and central nervous system (CNS) has always been a major goal of neuroscience. Understanding the wiring diagrams of the neuromuscular junction connectomes (full connectivity of nervous system neuronal components) is a starting point for this, as it helps in the study of the organizational and developmental properties of the mammalian CNS. The phenomenon of synapse elimination during developmental stages of the neuronal circuitry is such an example. Due to the organizational specificity of the axons in the connectomes, it becomes important to label and extract individual axons for morphological analysis. Features such as axonal trajectories, their branching patterns, geometric information, the spatial relations of groups of axons, etc. are of great interests for neurobiologists in the study of wiring diagrams. However, due to the complexity of spatial structure of the axons, automatically tracking and reconstructing them from microscopy images in 3D is an unresolved problem. In this article, AxonTracker-3D, an interactive 3D axon tracking and labeling tool is built to obtain quantitative information by reconstruction of the axonal structures in the entire innervation field. The ease of use along with accuracy of results makes AxonTracker-3D an attractive tool to obtain valuable quantitative information from axon datasets. Availability: The software is freely available for download at http://www.cbi-tmhs.org/AxonTracker/ Contact: stwong@tmhs.orgKeywords
This publication has 20 references indexed in Scilit:
- Detection of the optimal neuron traces in confocal microscopy imagesJournal of Neuroscience Methods, 2009
- Axon tracking in serial block-face scanning electron microscopyMedical Image Analysis, 2009
- 3D Axon Structure Extraction and Analysis in Confocal Fluorescence Microscopy ImagesNeural Computation, 2008
- A technicolour approach to the connectomeNature Reviews Neuroscience, 2008
- Comprehensive Maps of Drosophila Higher Olfactory Centers: Spatially Segregated Fruit and Pheromone RepresentationCell, 2007
- A Map of Olfactory Representation in the Drosophila Mushroom BodyCell, 2007
- Repulsive force based snake model to segment and track neuronal axons in 3D microscopy image stacksNeuroImage, 2006
- Imaging Neuronal Subsets in Transgenic Mice Expressing Multiple Spectral Variants of GFPNeuron, 2000
- The structure of the nervous system of the nematodeCaenorhabditis elegansPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. B, Biological Sciences, 1986
- Ultrastructural correlates of naturally occurring differences in transmitter release efficacy in frog motor nerve terminalsJournal of Neurocytology, 1985