Brittin et al. 2021

A multi-scale brain map derived from whole-brain volumetric reconstructions

Christopher A. Brittin, Steven J. Cook, David H. Hall, Scott W. Emmons & Netta Cohen
Nature 591, 105–110
Published: 24 February 2021

Datasets incorporated

• Brittin et al. 2021

Resources from publication

• parsetrakem2 package
• Data released

Summary

• Two complete volumetric reconstructions of the C.elegans nerve ring from previously published EMs White et al. 1986
  • adult
  • larval stage 4 (L4) worm
• Two series of EMs span approx the same volume with a length of 36 micrometres, starting in the anterior and ending in the ventral ganglia.
• The reconstructions of these two nerve rings provide the first complete, nanoscale-resolution datasets of all neuronal membrane contacts of any neuropil.
• Presents a "contactome": the set of membrane contacts of the brain.
• They define two neurons as immediate neighbours if the membranes along their neural processes are physically adjacent in at least one EM.
• To characterise synaptic pathways within a spatial context, they integrated volumetric reconstructions with recent re-scoring of synapses on the same L4 and adult worms (Cook et al. 2019) for validation and comparison with other datasets: White et al. 1986; Witvliet et al. 2021)