Last time we showed you how we straighten out a wobbly spinal cord. Now it’s time for the real deal: we built a 3D lightsheet spinal cord reference atlas!
We took many straightened spinal cords and merged them using a smoothed, interpolated atlas built in-house (magic done by Salif Komi, sitting right next to me! 👏 ), turning a pile of individual samples into one shared, navigable 3D reference.
Why does this matter? Because once every spinal cord speaks the same coordinate language, you can finally start comparing rabbits to rabbits, across animals, across conditions, across experiments. No more guessing from a 2D slice and hoping for the best.
As always, this atlas is part of the work I’m doing with Grace Houser in Rune Berg lab at the Department of Neuroscience, University of Copenhagen as partners of the Project Move2Treat – EU HORIZON EIC 2024 PATHFINDER OPEN