| dc.contributor | Ledderose, J., Institute of Biochemistry, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Sención, L., Instituto de Neurociencias, Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico; Salgado, H., Departamento de Neurociencias, Centro de Investigaciones Regionales Dr. Hideyo Noguchi, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Yucatán, Mexico; Arias-Carrión, O., Unidad de Trastornos Del Movimiento y Sueño (TMS), Hospital General Dr. Manuel Gea González, México D.F., Mexico; Treviño, M., Instituto de Neurociencias, Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico | |
| dc.description.abstract | Anatomy plays a fundamental role in supporting and shaping nervous system activity. The remarkable progress of computer processing power within the last two decades has enabled the generation of electronic databases of complete three-dimensional (3D) dendritic and axonal morphology for neuroanatomical studies. Several laboratories are freely posting their reconstructions online after result publication v.gr. NeuroMorpho.Org (Nat Rev Neurosci 7:318-324, 2006). These neuroanatomical archives represent a crucial resource to explore the relationship between structure and function in the brain (Front Neurosci 6:49, 2012). However, such 'Cartesian' descriptions bear little intuitive information for neuroscientists. Here, we developed a simple prototype of a MATLAB-based software tool to quantitatively describe the 3D neuronal structures from public repositories. The program imports neuronal reconstructions and quantifies statistical distributions of basic morphological parameters such as branch length, tortuosity, branch's genealogy and bifurcation angles. Using these morphological distributions, our algorithm can generate a set of virtual neurons readily usable for network simulations. © 2014 Ledderose et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. | |
