ATLAS OF THE BUCCAL GANGLIA

Above are four views of the complete atlas of the paired buccal ganglia of Lymnaea stagnalis reconstructed from our synchrotron X-ray tomography stack collected at Diamond Light Source. For this dataset, 3001 projections were recorded at equidistant viewing angles (0.06° steps) over 180° of sample rotation. Images were acquired using a 10x objective: exposure time was 0.47 s per image with a total scan time ~20 mins. Tomographic reconstructions were obtained using Savu software developed at Diamond. Annotation of the 3D image stacks and the subsequent generation of 3D meshes was achieved using WEBKNOSSOS. Outputs were rendered in Blender (blender.org).

The buccal ganglia house the main feeding circuitry, which includes the ingestion and egestion central pattern generator networks. The total neuron count obtained in the reconstruction shown here is 1099 cells. This includes motoneurons, modulatory neurons and interneurons. A subset of important classes of these neurons are reliably identifiable using the cell atlas. For each of these we also carried out functional recordings and gathered all the information together to provide a detail description of the properties of the neurons. This should hopefully be helpful and instructive for experimenters who wish to locate these cell-types in their own experiments.

Click below to access directories of neurons: