The Virtual Insect Brain protocol: creating and comparing standardized neuroanatomy

Background: In the fly Drosophila melanogaster, new genetic, physiological, molecular and behavioral techniques for the functional analysis of the brain are rapidly accumulating. These diverse investigations on the function of the insect brain use gene expression patterns that can be visualized and provide the means for manipulating groups of neurons as a common ground. To take advantage of these patterns one needs to know their typical anatomy. Results: This paper describes the Virtual Insect Brain (VIB) protocol, a script suite for the quantitative assessment, comparison, and presentation of neuroanatomical data. It is based on the 3D-reconstruction and visualization software Amira, version 3.x (Mercury Inc.) [1]. Besides its backbone, a standardization procedure which aligns individual 3D images (series of virtual sections obtained by confocal microscopy) to a common coordinate system and computes average intensities for each voxel (volume pixel) the VIB protocol provides an elabor...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Arnim Jenett, Johannes E. Schindelin, Martin Heisenberg
• Keywords: BMCBI 2006, Gene Expression Patterns, Insect Brain, VIB Protocol