Whole human-brain mapping of single cortical neurons for profiling morphological diversity and stereotypy

作者：Xiaofeng Han, Shuxia Guo, Nan Ji, Tian Li, Jian Liu, Xiangqiao Ye, Yi Wang, Zhixi Yun, Feng Xiong, Jing Rong, Di Liu, Hui Ma, Yujin Wang, Yue Huang, Peng Zhang, Wenhao Wu, Liya Ding, Michael Hawrylycz, Ed S. Lein, Giorgio A. Ascoli, Wei Xie, Lijuan Liu, Liwei Zhang, Hanchuan Peng · 发表于：Science Advances · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1126/sciadv.adf3771 · 被引用次数：32 · 研究领域：Cell Image Analysis Techniques、Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics、Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques

Quantifying neuron morphology and distribution at the whole-brain scale is essential to understand the structure and diversity of cell types. It is exceedingly challenging to reuse recent technologies of single-cell labeling and whole-brain imaging to study human brains. We propose adaptive cell tomography (ACTomography), a low-cost, high-throughput, and high-efficacy tomography approach, based on adaptive targeting of individual cells. We established a platform to inject dyes into cortical neurons in surgical tissues of 18 patients with brain tumors or other conditions and one donated fresh postmortem brain. We collected three-dimensional images of 1746 cortical neurons, of which 852 neurons were reconstructed to quantify local dendritic morphology, and mapped to standard atlases. In our data, human neurons are more diverse across brain regions than by subject age or gender. The strong stereotypy within cohorts of brain regions allows generating a statistical tensor field of neuron morphology to characterize anatomical modularity of a human brain.