Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience Systems Neuroscience
A standard atlas of the bee brain is developed and tested by creating a standard atlas of the bee brain, which can be used to successfully reconstruct components of a neural network from separately acquired neurons and to visualize their spatial relations.
Abstract
for the precise composition of multiple reconstructions would be an atlas of the whole brain that contains a large number of landmarks for warping different brains into one reference (e.g., Toga and Mazziotta, 2002). We developed and tested the suitability of this approach by creating a standard atlas of the bee brain (the honeybee standard brain: HSB, Brandt et al., 2005). The HSB atlas can be used to successfully reconstruct components of a neural network from separately acquired neurons and to visualize their spatial relations. To create digital standard insect brains, two standardization methods have been employed: (1) The iterative shape method (ISA), which eliminates individual shape variability (Rohlfing et al., 2001; Brandt et al., 2005; Kvello et al., 2009). (2) The virtual insect brain (VIB) protocol , which allows a comparative volume analysis of brain neuropils, developmental studies, and studies on neuronal plasticity and genetic differences (Rein et al., 2002; Kurylas et al., 2008; el Jundi et al., 2009). We favored the ISA standard, which is derived by averaging across multiple individual brains. Analyses of other procedures, for example , selecting an individual representative brain, have shown that the averaging procedure is best suited to the registration of neurons collected from different brains (Kurylas et al., 2008).