Neuronal diversity and stereotypy at multiple scales through whole brain morphometry
Yufeng Liu, Shengdian Jiang, Yingxin Li, Sujun Zhao, Zhixi Yun, Zuo-Han Zhao, Lingli Zhang, Gaoyu Wang, Xin Chen, Linus Manubens-Gil, Y Hang, Qiaobo Gong, Yuanyuan Li, Penghao Qian, Lei Qu, Marta García-Forn, Wei Wang, Silvia De Rubeis, Zhuhao Wu, Pavel Osten, Hui Gong, Michael Hawrylycz, Partha P. Mitra, Hong‐Wei Dong, Qingming Luo, Giorgio A. Ascoli, Hongkui Zeng, Lijuan Liu, Hanchuan Peng
Abstract
We conducted a large-scale whole-brain morphometry study by analyzing 3.7 peta-voxels of mouse brain images at the single-cell resolution, producing one of the largest multi-morphometry databases of mammalian brains to date. We registered 204 mouse brains of three major imaging modalities to the Allen Common Coordinate Framework (CCF) atlas, annotated 182,497 neuronal cell bodies, modeled 15,441 dendritic microenvironments, characterized the full morphology of 1876 neurons along with their axonal motifs, and detected 2.63 million axonal varicosities that indicate potential synaptic sites. Our analyzed six levels of information related to neuronal populations, dendritic microenvironments, single-cell full morphology, dendritic and axonal arborization, axonal varicosities, and sub-neuronal structural motifs, along with a quantification of the diversity and stereotypy of patterns at each level. This integrative study provides key anatomical descriptions of neurons and their types across a multiple scales and features, contributing a substantial resource for understanding neuronal diversity in mammalian brains.