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NeuronsReunited-viewer: a 3d-visual interactive web portal that integrates large databases of long-range projection neurons in mouse.
Rembrandt Bakker, Nestor Timonidis, Mario Rubio-Teves, Maria García-Amado, Francisco Clascá, Paul Tiesinga
Presenting author:
Rembrandt Bakker
To achieve an new level of detail in the wiring diagram of the mouse brain, attention has shifted towards reconstructing a large number of individual long range projection neurons (LRPNs) in 3d and to register the resulting morphologies to a common brain space. Databases of a large number of LRPNs will enable us to resolve the brain's connectivity at cellular resolution if they are sampled at a high enough density, and if they are registered precisely enough to have their somata and axon terminals in the right nucleus or cortical layer. This is an area of great concern, for example in the publication of Peng et al. [doi 10.1038/s41586-021-03941-1], the soma locations of about 30% of all 1741 neurons was modified after manual correction, so one may suspect similar inaccuracies in axon terminal positions.

As part of an effort to validate the large databases against a small set of gold-standard neurons, we have developed an open platform from which neurons can be visually compared across databases or with locally stored morphologies: https://neuroinformatics.nl/HBP/neuronsreunited-viewer. The viewer acts as a proxy to (at present) four large databases of LRPNs: 1544 from Mouselight [doi 10.1016/j.cell.2019.07.042], 1741 from Braintell [doi 10.1038/s41586-021-03941-1], 46 from Han et al. [doi 10.1038/nature26159], and 6357 from braindatacenter.cn [doi 10.21203/rs.3.rs-117637/v1].
The viewer makes use of the extensive visualization capabilities of SBA Composer [sba-dev.incf.org/composer], see youtu.be/8pht5DxeVbk for an example, and can be linked to the EBRAINS [https://ebrains.eu/] platform for integration with data sources in its knowledge space.

Supported by FLAG-ERA grant NeuronsReunited (NWO 680-91-318, MICINN-AEI PCI2019-111900-2), and by EU H2020 grant agreement 945539 (HBP SGA3).