A platform for brain-wide imaging and reconstruction of individual neurons
Michael N Economo,
Nathan G Clack,
Luke D Lavis,
Charles R Gerfen,
Karel Svoboda,
Eugene W Myers,
Jayaram Chandrashekar
Affiliations
Michael N Economo
Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, United States
Nathan G Clack
Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, United States
Luke D Lavis
Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, United States
Charles R Gerfen
Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, United States; Laboratory of Systems Neuroscience, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, United States
Karel Svoboda
Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, United States
Eugene W Myers
Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, United States; Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany
Jayaram Chandrashekar
Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, United States
The structure of axonal arbors controls how signals from individual neurons are routed within the mammalian brain. However, the arbors of very few long-range projection neurons have been reconstructed in their entirety, as axons with diameters as small as 100 nm arborize in target regions dispersed over many millimeters of tissue. We introduce a platform for high-resolution, three-dimensional fluorescence imaging of complete tissue volumes that enables the visualization and reconstruction of long-range axonal arbors. This platform relies on a high-speed two-photon microscope integrated with a tissue vibratome and a suite of computational tools for large-scale image data. We demonstrate the power of this approach by reconstructing the axonal arbors of multiple neurons in the motor cortex across a single mouse brain.
