Neuroanatomy is the study of the structure and organization of the nervous system. In contrast to animals with radial symmetry, whose nervous system consists of a distributed network of cells, animals with bilateral symmetry have segregated, defined nervous systems. Their neuroanatomy is therefore better understood. In vertebrates, the nervous system is segregated into the internal structure of the brain and spinal cord and the series of nerves that connect the CNS to the rest of the body. Breaking down and identifying specific parts of the nervous system has been crucial for figuring out how it operates. For example, much of what neuroscientists have learned comes from observing how damage or "lesions" to specific brain areas affects behavior or other neural functions.
The pyramidal tracts include both the corticobulbar tract and the corticospinal tract. These are aggregations of efferent nerve fibers from the upper motor neurons that travel from the cerebral cortex and terminate either in the brainstem (corticobulbar) or spinal cord (corticospinal) and are involved in the control of motor functions of the body.
The Gene Ontology (GO) is a major bioinformatics initiative to unify the representation of gene and gene product attributes across all species. More specifically, the project aims to: 1) maintain and develop its controlled vocabulary of gene and gene product attributes; 2) annotate genes and gene products, and assimilate and disseminate annotation data; and 3) provide tools for easy access to all aspects of the data provided by the project, and to enable functional interpretation of experimental data using the GO, for example via enrichment analysis. GO is part of a larger classification effort, the Open Biomedical Ontologies, being one of the Initial Candidate Members of the OBO Foundry.
BrainMaps is an NIH-funded interactive zoomable high-resolution digital brain atlas and virtual microscope that is based on more than 140 million megapixels of scanned images of serial sections of both primate and non-primate brains and that is integrated with a high-speed database for querying and retrieving data about brain structure and function over the internet.
Neuromorphology is the study of nervous system form, shape, and structure. The study involves looking at a particular part of the nervous system from a molecular and cellular level and connecting it to a physiological and anatomical point of view. The field also explores the communications and interactions within and between each specialized section of the nervous system. Morphology is distinct from morphogenesis. Morphology is the study of the shape and structure of biological organisms, while morphogenesis is the study of the biological development of the shape and structure of organisms. Therefore, neuromorphology focuses on the specifics of the structure of the nervous system and not the process by which the structure was developed. Neuromorphology and morphogenesis, while two different entities, are nonetheless closely linked.
The Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD) project provides biological research communities with a toolkit of open-source software components for visualizing, annotating, managing, and storing biological data. The GMOD project is funded by the United States National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and the USDA Agricultural Research Service.
FlyBase is an online bioinformatics database and the primary repository of genetic and molecular data for the insect family Drosophilidae. For the most extensively studied species and model organism, Drosophila melanogaster, a wide range of data are presented in different formats.
The Zebrafish Information Network is an online biological database of information about the zebrafish. The zebrafish is a widely used model organism for genetic, genomic, and developmental studies, and ZFIN provides an integrated interface for querying and displaying the large volume of data generated by this research. To facilitate use of the zebrafish as a model of human biology, ZFIN links these data to corresponding information about other model organisms and to human disease databases. Abundant links to external sequence databases and to genome browsers are included. Gene product, gene expression, and phenotype data are annotated with terms from biomedical ontologies. ZFIN is based at the University of Oregon in the United States, with funding provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The GAL4-UAS system is a biochemical method used to study gene expression and function in organisms such as the fruit fly. It is based on the finding by Hitoshi Kakidani and Mark Ptashne, and Nicholas Webster and Pierre Chambon in 1988 that Gal4 binding to UAS sequences activates gene expression. The method was introduced into flies by Andrea Brand and Norbert Perrimon in 1993 and is considered a powerful technique for studying the expression of genes. The system has two parts: the Gal4 gene, encoding the yeast transcription activator protein Gal4, and the UAS, an enhancer to which GAL4 specifically binds to activate gene transcription.
Brainbow is a process by which individual neurons in the brain can be distinguished from neighboring neurons using fluorescent proteins. By randomly expressing different ratios of red, green, and blue derivatives of green fluorescent protein in individual neurons, it is possible to flag each neuron with a distinctive color. This process has been a major contribution to the field of neural connectomics.
The Neuroscience Information Framework is a repository of global neuroscience web resources, including experimental, clinical, and translational neuroscience databases, knowledge bases, atlases, and genetic/genomic resources and provides many authoritative links throughout the neuroscience portal of Wikipedia.
Ganglion mother cells (GMCs) are cells involved in neurogenesis, in non-mammals, that divide only once to give rise to two neurons, or one neuron and one glial cell or two glial cells, and are present only in the central nervous system. They are also responsible for transcription factor expression. While each ganglion mother cell necessarily gives rise to two neurons, a neuroblast can asymmetrically divide multiple times. GMCs are the progeny of type I neuroblasts. Neuroblasts asymmetrically divide during embryogenesis to create GMCs. GMCs are only present in certain species and only during the embryonic and larval stages of life. Recent research has shown that there is an intermediate stage between a GMC and two neurons. The GMC forms two ganglion cells which then develop into neurons or glial cells. Embryonic neurogenesis has been extensively studied in Drosophila melanogaster embryos and larvae.
EMAGE is an online biological database of gene expression data in the developing mouse embryo. The data held in EMAGE is spatially annotated to a framework of 3D mouse embryo models produced by EMAP. These spatial annotations allow users to query EMAGE by spatial pattern as well as by gene name, anatomy term or Gene Ontology (GO) term. EMAGE is a freely available web-based resource funded by the Medical Research Council (UK) and based at the MRC Human Genetics Unit in the Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine, Edinburgh, UK.
Pigment dispersing factor (pdf) is a gene that encodes the protein PDF, which is part of a large family of neuropeptides. Its hormonal product, pigment dispersing hormone (PDH), was named for the diurnal pigment movement effect it has in crustacean retinal cells upon its initial discovery in the central nervous system of arthropods. The movement and aggregation of pigments in retina cells and extra-retinal cells is hypothesized to be under a split hormonal control mechanism. One hormonal set is responsible for concentrating chromatophoral pigment by responding to changes in the organism's exposure time to darkness. Another hormonal set is responsible for dispersion and responds to the light cycle. However, insect pdf genes do not function in such pigment migration since they lack the chromatophore.
A Drosophila connectome is a list of neurons in the Drosophila melanogaster nervous system, and the chemical synapses between them. The fly's nervous system consists of the brain plus the ventral nerve cord, and both are known to differ considerably between male and female. Dense connectomes have been completed for the female adult brain, the male nerve cord, and the female larval stage. The available connectomes show only chemical synapses - other forms of inter-neuron communication such as gap junctions or neuromodulators are not represented. Drosophila is the most complex creature with a connectome, which had only been previously obtained for three other simpler organisms, first C. elegans. The connectomes have been obtained by the methods of neural circuit reconstruction, which over the course of many years worked up through various subsets of the fly brain to the almost full connectomes that exist today.
Vaa3D is an Open Source visualization and analysis software suite created mainly by Hanchuan Peng and his team at Janelia Research Campus, HHMI and Allen Institute for Brain Science. The software performs 3D, 4D and 5D rendering and analysis of very large image data sets, especially those generated using various modern microscopy methods, and associated 3D surface objects. This software has been used in several large neuroscience initiatives and a number of applications in other domains. In a recent Nature Methods review article, it has been viewed as one of the leading open-source software suites in the related research fields. In addition, research using this software was awarded the 2012 Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences.
Q-system is a genetic tool that allows to express transgenes in a living organism. Originally the Q-system was developed for use in the vinegar fly Drosophila melanogaster, and was rapidly adapted for use in cultured mammalian cells, zebrafish, worms and mosquitoes. The Q-system utilizes genes from the qa cluster of the bread fungus Neurospora crassa, and consists of four components: the transcriptional activator (QF/QF2/QF2w), the enhancer QUAS, the repressor QS, and the chemical de-repressor quinic acid. Similarly to GAL4/UAS and LexA/LexAop, the Q-system is a binary expression system that allows to express reporters or effectors in a defined subpopulation of cells with the purpose of visualising these cells or altering their function. In addition, GAL4/UAS, LexA/LexAop and the Q-system function independently of each other and can be used simultaneously to achieve a desired pattern of reporter expression, or to express several reporters in different subsets of cells.
Neural circuit reconstruction is the reconstruction of the detailed circuitry of the nervous system of an animal. It is sometimes called EM reconstruction since the main method used is the electron microscope (EM). This field is a close relative of reverse engineering of human-made devices, and is part of the field of connectomics, which in turn is a sub-field of neuroanatomy.
Echinobase is a Model Organism Database (MOD). It supports the international research community by providing a centralized, integrated web based resource to access the diverse and rich, functional genomics data of echinoderm evolution, development and gene regulatory networks.
Gregory Stephen Xavier Edward Jefferis is a British neuroscientist known for his work on the circuit basis of olfactory perception in the vinegar fly, Drosophila melanogaster. He is a tenured Programme Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK) and associated with the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.
