PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Alexander S. Bates
AU  - James D. Manton
AU  - Sridhar R. Jagannathan
AU  - Marta Costa
AU  - Philipp Schlegel
AU  - Torsten Rohlfing
AU  - Gregory S. X. E. Jefferis
TI  - The natverse: a versatile computational toolbox to combine and analyse neuroanatomical data
AID  - 10.1101/006353
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 006353
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/11/07/006353.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/11/07/006353.full
AB  - To analyse neuron data at scale, neuroscientists expend substantial effort reading documentation, installing dependencies and moving between analysis and visualisation environments. To facilitate this, we have developed a suite of interoperable open-source R packages called the natverse. The natverse allows users to read local and remote data, perform popular analyses including visualisation, clustering and graph-theoretic analysis of neuronal branching. Unlike most tools, the natverse enables comparison of morphology and connectivity across many neurons after imaging or co-registration within a common template space. The natverse also enables transformations between different template spaces and imaging modalities. We demonstrate tools that integrate the vast majority of Drosophila neuroanatomical light microscopy and electron microscopy connectomic datasets. The natverse is an easy-to-use environment for neuroscientists to solve complex, large-scale analysis challenges as well as an open platform to create new code and packages to share with the community.