PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - John A Bogovic
AU  - Hideo Otsuna
AU  - Larissa Heinrich
AU  - Masayoshi Ito
AU  - Jennifer Jeter
AU  - Geoffrey Meissner
AU  - Aljoscha Nern
AU  - Jennifer Colonell
AU  - Oz Malkesman
AU  - Kei Ito
AU  - Stephan Saalfeld
TI  - An unbiased template of the <em>Drosophila</em> brain and ventral nerve cord
AID  - 10.1101/376384
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 376384
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/12/21/376384.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/12/21/376384.full
AB  - The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is an important model organism for neuroscience with a wide array of genetic tools that enable the mapping of individuals neurons and neural subtypes. Brain templates are essential for comparative biological studies because they enable analyzing many individuals in a common reference space. Several central brain templates exist for Drosophila, but every one is either biased, uses sub-optimal tissue preparation, is imaged at low resolution, or does not account for artifacts. No publicly available Drosophila ventral nerve cord template currently exists. In this work, we created high-resolution templates of the Drosophila brain and ventral nerve cord using the best-available technologies for imaging, artifact correction, stitching, and template construction using groupwise registration. We evaluated our central brain template against the four most competitive, publicly available brain templates and demonstrate that ours enables more accurate registration with fewer local deformations in shorter time.