Looking for a quick way to map the brain of your favourite small animal model? See our new paper. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 1/10 - ThreadSky

kevinstaras.bsky.social • 15 hours ago

Looking for a quick way to map the brain of your favourite small animal model?
See our new paper. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2422706122 1/10

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kevinstaras.bsky.social•15 hours ago

The mollusc Lymnaea is a classical system for neural circuit studies. However, we lack a cell-level atlas of its multi-mm scale brain to guide functional investigations. The solution? 2/10

kevinstaras.bsky.social•15 hours ago

We plastic-embedded the 3x3x2 mm3 brain and performed X-ray tomography imaging at the Diamond Synchrotron Facility @diamondlightsource.bsky.social

kevinstaras.bsky.social•15 hours ago

We then used the excellent volume image-sharing, annotation, and reconstruction platform @webknossos.org to fully reconstruct the buccal ganglia (one side is shown here) housing the main feeding circuitry, yielding the first accurate estimate of the total number of neurons: ~1100. 4/10

kevinstaras.bsky.social•15 hours ago

The 3D reconstruction revealed the organization of neurons beneath the surface layer for the first time. It turns out around half the neurons (coloured orange) are non-superficial - a hidden world of circuit components that can now be studied. 5/10

kevinstaras.bsky.social•15 hours ago

The consistent positioning of neurons across Lymnaea brains means the atlas can guide follow-up functional experiments. Targeting a non-superficial region led to the discovery of DINE (“Diamond Neuron”), an apt name 😜 because it activates the food ingestion circuitry. 6/10

kevinstaras.bsky.social•15 hours ago

We also brought together the anatomical mapping and functional information to establish the beginnings of a fully scalable functional cell atlas of the brain of Lymnaea stagnalis: https://sites.google.com/view/snailbrainmap/ 7/10

kevinstaras.bsky.social•15 hours ago

A full CNS scan took ~3 mins, and higher-res stacks (voxel size: 0.325 µm) <20 mins. Browse a sample here: https://wklink.org/2643 3.5/10

kevinstaras.bsky.social•15 hours ago

We then used the excellent volume image-sharing, annotation, and reconstruction platform
@webknossos.org to fully reconstruct the buccal ganglia (one side is shown here) housing the main feeding circuitry, yielding the first accurate estimate of the total number of neurons: ~1100. 4/10

kevinstaras.bsky.social•15 hours ago

kevinstaras.bsky.social•14 hours ago

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