What is it about?
Thanks to their large identified neurons, simpler animals, such as molluscs, have provided some of the most fundamental insights into how neural circuits generate and control behaviour. However, in many cases, further understanding is limited by the absence of detailed brain maps. Here we addressed this issue by using synchrotron-powered X-ray imaging to rapidly build a three-dimensional atlas of the snail brain. Our map offers new understanding of the design principles of the molluscan nervous system and uncovers novel neuron types with important, but to date uncharacterized, functional roles.
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Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our approach enables the rapid imaging of a brain, or brain structure, down to sub-micron resolution. There are alternative elegant ways to gain a more detailed brain atlas but these are time-consuming and often challenging in larger multi-millimeter-scale nervous systems, such as that of a mollusc. Our method offers a quick means to generate an overview atlas that can inform detailed follow-up functional interrogation.
Perspectives
Our approach provides a powerful way to rapidly gain a three-dimensional representation of a multi-millimeter-scale brain. Excitingly, it should also readily generalize to brain atlas-building in other simpler organisms. This would enable sharing of accurate representations of neuroanatomy across research groups for comparative and functional studies.
Kevin Staras
University of Sussex
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Functional mapping of the molluscan brain guided by synchrotron X-ray tomography, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2422706122.
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