www.neuron.yale.edu

Hi.

I was wondering if there is such thing as a "standard morphology file" for an L5 pyramid. In other words, whose file would you chose/ think of if you wanted to build a stereotypical cortical L5 pyramid? What are the most prominent non-hippocampus papers that include realistic morphologies in their models? What caveats are there to look out for when using other people's morphology files? I know the answers to these questions are sort of personal preference, but it'd be valuable anyhow.

Thank you

tim

tpv wrote:I was wondering if there is such thing as a "standard morphology file" for an L5 pyramid.

No.

NeuroMorpho.org is likely to contain many possibly useful morphologies, but before using
any data you find there or elsewhere, be sure to carefully read any paper(s) that were
written about those data by the anatomist(s) who obtained them.

Several articles about quantitative morphometry of neurons discuss various artifacts that
can afflict such data. Two that are well worth reading are:
Kaspirzhny AV, Gogan P, Horcholle-Bossavit G, Tyc-Dumont S. 2002.
Neuronal morphology data bases: morphological noise and assesment of data quality.
Network: Computation in Neural Systems 13:357-380.
Scorcioni, R., Lazarewicz, M.T., and Ascoli, G.A.
Quantitative morphometry of hippocampal pyramidal cells: differences between
anatomical classes and reconstructing laboratories.
Journal of Comparative Neurology 473:177-193, 2004.

The issues addressed by these papers have a lot to do with objective criteria for data
quality, and not that much to do with personal preference. Anyone who knows of a more
recent or authoritative paper on the quality of morphometric data is more than welcome
to suggest it.