Abstract
AbstractA consensus on the number of morphologically different types of pyramidal cells (PCs) in the neocortex has not yet been reached, despite over a century of anatomical studies. This is because of a lack of agreement on the subjective classifications of neuron types, which is based on expert analyses of neuronal morphologies: the shapes of somata, dendrites, and axons. Even for neurons that are visually different to non-experts, there is no common ground to consistently distinguish morphological types. We found that objective classification is possible with methods from algebraic topology, and that the dendritic arbor is sufficient for reliable identification of distinct types of PCs. We also provide a solution for the more challenging problem of whether two similar neurons belong to different types or to a continuum of the same type. Using this scheme, we objectively identify seventeen types of PCs in the rat somatosensory cortex. Our topological classification does not require expert input, is stable, and helps settle the long-standing debate on whether cell-types are discrete or continuous morphological variations of each other.
Publisher
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Reference66 articles.
1. Reconstruction and visualization of large-scale volumetric models of neocortical circuits for physically-plausible in silico optical studies;BMC bioinformatics,2017
2. Abdellah, M.M.A. (2017). In Silico Brain Imaging: Physically-plausible Methods for Visualizing Neocortical Microcircuitry.
3. L-Neuron: a modeling tool for the efficient generation and parsimonious description of dendritic morphology;Neurocomputing,2000
4. In search of a periodic table of the neurons: Axonal-dendritic circuitry as the organizing principle: Patterns of axons and dendrites within distinct anatomical parcels provide the blueprint for circuit based neuronal classification;BioEssays: news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology,2016
5. Optimal current transfer in dendrites;PLoS Comput Biol,2016
Cited by
2 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献