Towards an ultra-high resolution 3D neurotransmitter receptor atlas

Speaker: Thomas Funck

Bio: After a B.A. in Philosophy and MSc in Neuroscience, Thomas has finally completed his PhD in Neuroscience at the MNI this year and is now working as post-doctoral research fellow at Forschungszentrum Jülich in the lab of Nicola Palomero-Gallagher.

Talk Abstract: Quantitative atlases of neurotransmitter receptor densities in healthy and pathologic human brains are important for characterizing normal and pathologic brain function and behaviour. Autoradiography can be used to visualize receptor density in 2D sections, but is challenging to reconstruct in 3D. In prior work, Karl Zilles and Nicola Palomero-Gallagher had acquired acquired autoradiographs for 20 neurotransmitter binding sites from 3 donor brains. This data set has to date not been fully reconstructed into 3D because of the many unique challanges involved in performing such reconstruction for these data. This presentation describes the creation of a pipeline for producing the first ever set of ultra-high resolution (50μm) 3D atlases using this data. We illustrate its application on 4 different GABAergic neurotransmitter binding sites in the human brain. These 3D receptor atlases will provide a novel and unparalleled set of atlases for the neuroscience research community that will help better elucidate the functional anatomy of the human brain.