Duplication of barrel inputs in the Robo3 cKO
A mutant with bilateral whisker to barrel inputs unveils somatosensory mapping rules in the cerebral cortex
Renier N, Dominici C, Erzurumlu RS, Kratochwil CF, Rijli FM, Gaspar P, Chédotal A. Elife. 2017
When sensory axons reach the cortex during development, to they preferentially cluster in a topographic manner, or do they prioritize post-synaptic targets pre-defined genetically. We characterize a mouse mutant for which the sensory projections from the whiskers were partially uncrossed. This led to the duplication of the thalamic and cortical maps from the left and right representations on each side of the brain. Surprisingly, the left and right maps were kept segregated spatially. This suggests that during development, the continuity of adjacent inputs is preserved over the respect for cortical patterning cues.
Mapping of cortical Fos expression following an active exploration task with or without whiskers.
Mapping of Brain Activity by Automated Volume Analysis of Immediate Early Genes
Nicolas Renier*, Eliza L. Adams*, Christoph Kirst*, Zhuhao Wu*, Ricardo Azevedo, Johannes Kohl, Anita E. Autry, Lolahon Kadiri, Kannan Umadevi Venkataraju, Yu Zhou, Victoria X. Wang, Cheuk Y. Tang, Olav Olsen, Catherine Dulac, Pavel Osten and Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Cell 2016
Immediate early genes are a powerful way to assess recent neuronal activity with histological techniques. The beauty of assays relying on Fos expression is that they can be used on any animal species, without constraining the animal behavior with recording devices. However, quantifying Fos+ neurons in the brain is a daunting task. Here, we set out to create a complete pipeline, from sample collection to data analysis, to efficiently map the location of all active Fos+ neurons in the brain introducing two new techniques: iDISCO+ tissue clearing and ClearMap object mapping.
Whole-mount immunolabeling of tdTomato in a ChAT-cre ; Ai14 line with iDISCO. This shows the oculomotor nucleus with the IPN and fasciculus retroflexus.
iDISCO: a simple, rapid method to immunolabel large tissue samples for volume imaging
Nicolas Renier*, Zhuhao Wu*, David J. Simon, Jing Yang, Pablo Ariel and Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Cell 2014
Tissue clearing offers the possibility to image deep in samples using light sheet microscopy. Here, we set out to design an immunolabeling and tissue clearing protocol, based on the 3DISCO method that is compatible with adult organs. This method, termed iDISCO, enables the large scale 3D study of immunostained adult brains, or any other organs, pushing forward the possibility offered by modern histological techniques.