TY  - JOUR
A1  - Cuntz, Hermann
A1  - Forstner, Friedrich
A1  - Haag, Jürgen
A1  - Borst, Alexander
T1  - The morphological identity of insect dendrites
T2  - PLoS Computational Biology
N2  - Dendrite morphology, a neuron's anatomical fingerprint, is a neuroscientist's asset in unveiling organizational principles in the brain. However, the genetic program encoding the morphological identity of a single dendrite remains a mystery. In order to obtain a formal understanding of dendritic branching, we studied distributions of morphological parameters in a group of four individually identifiable neurons of the fly visual system. We found that parameters relating to the branching topology were similar throughout all cells. Only parameters relating to the area covered by the dendrite were cell type specific. With these areas, artificial dendrites were grown based on optimization principles minimizing the amount of wiring and maximizing synaptic democracy. Although the same branching rule was used for all cells, this yielded dendritic structures virtually indistinguishable from their real counterparts. From these principles we derived a fully-automated model-based neuron reconstruction procedure validating the artificial branching rule. In conclusion, we suggest that the genetic program implementing neuronal branching could be constant in all cells whereas the one responsible for the dendrite spanning field should be cell specific.
Y1  - 2008
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/31143
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-311430
SN  - 1553-7358
SN  - 1553-734X
N1  - Copyright: © 2008 Cuntz et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
VL  - 4
IS  - (12):e1000251
PB  - PLoS
CY  - Lawrence, Kan.
ER  -