RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 An unbiased template of the Drosophila brain and ventral nerve cord JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 376384 DO 10.1101/376384 A1 John A Bogovic A1 Hideo Otsuna A1 Larissa Heinrich A1 Masayoshi Ito A1 Jennifer Jeter A1 Geoffrey Meissner A1 Aljoscha Nern A1 Jennifer Colonell A1 Oz Malkesman A1 Kei Ito A1 Stephan Saalfeld YR 2018 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/25/376384.abstract 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.