CORE--Quantitative Morphology

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The Quantitative Morphology Core (QMC) provides technology supports to the members of the Conte Center. The QMC has developed tools to quantify morphologic changes in spines and synapses at the confocal , multiphoton, and electron microscopy levels. These methods are developed to provide to provide the necessary degree of resolution to quantify plasticity-related changes in molecular constituents of synapses, a critical step to link such modifications to information processing. The QMC has developed applications designed to increase the throughput and accuracy, and reduce bias of quantitative analysis of immunogold electron microscopy of synapses as well as new tools to image Lucifer Yellow-injected neurons at high resolution from automatized acquisition of entire cells using confocal and multiphoton data.. These tools involve deconvolution, smoothing, automatic tiling, and 3-dimensional rendition with high level of detail and capacity for morphometric analysis of dendrites at the spine level of resolution. We are also performing mathematical modeling of neuronal complexity and biophysical simulation of the properties of the reconstructed neurons. The QMC was also involved in the development of a new stereologic probe to assess the 3-dimensional spatial distribution of particles in a volume of interest. Recently, the QMC has begun producing high resolution magnetic resonance microscopy (MRM; 9.4 T) datasets of the human amygdala to provide users with a high level of detail digital atlas of the human amygdala to be used as a reference guide for fMRI and PET analyses of live subjects as well as anatomic reference for amygdala nuclear parcellation. These MRM data will also inform the users on the degree of anatomic variation that occurs in the human amygdala.