An imaging analysis protocol to trace, quantify, and model multi-signal neuron morphology

Abstract

Summary: We describe how to reconstruct and quantify multi-signal neuronal morphology, using the dendritic distributions of microtubules and F-actin in sensory neurons from fly larvae as examples. We then provide a detailed procedure to analyze channel-specific morphometrics from these enhanced reconstructions. To illustrate applications, we demonstrate how to run a cytoskeleton-constrained simulation of dendritic tree generation and explain its validation against experimental data. This protocol is applicable to any species, developmental stage, brain region, cell class, branching process, and signal type.For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Nanda et al. (2020).

Keywords

• Bioinformatics
• Cell Biology
• Microscopy
• Neuroscience