4D Atlas of the Mouse Embryo (E11.5 - E14.0)
After more than a century of research, the mouse remains the
gold-standard model system, for it recapitulates human development
and disease while being quickly and highly tractable to genetic
manipulations. Foundational to the power and success of using a
mouse model is the ability to accurately stage embryonic mouse
development. Past staging systems were limited by the technologies
of the day, such that only surface features, visible with a light
microscope, could be recognized and used to define stages. With
the advent of high-throughput 3D imaging tools that capture embryo
morphology in microscopic detail, we now present the first 4D
atlas staging system for mouse embryonic development using optical
projection tomography and image registration methods. By tracking
3D trajectories of every anatomical point in the mouse embryo from
E11.5 - E14.0, we established the first 4D atlas comprised from
ex-vivo 3D mouse embryo reference images. The resulting 4D atlas
is comprised of 51 interpolated 3D images in this gestational range,
resulting in a temporal resolution of 72 minutes. From this 4D
atlas, any mouse embryo image can be subsequently compared and
staged at the global, voxel, and/or structural level. Assigning
an embryonic stage to each point in anatomy allows for unprecedented
quantitative analysis of developmental asynchrony among different
anatomical structures in the same mouse embryo. This comprehensive
developmental dataset offers developmental biologists a new,
powerful staging system that can identify and compare differences
in developmental timing in wild-type embryos and shows promise for
localizing deviations in mutant development.
The 51 individual mouse embryo atlases are available as 3D TIFF stacks here:
http://repo.mouseimaging.ca/repo/4D_embryo_atlases_M_Wong/
An open source viewer that can be used to examine the data is ImageJ
(
http://imagej.net/). We currently use version 1.46a on our system.
Here are example images of the E11.5 and E13.0 embryo atlas loaded in ImageJ: