1 research outputs found
Automatic Registration of Mass Spectrometry Imaging Data Sets to the Allen Brain Atlas
Mass
spectrometry imaging holds great potential for understanding
the molecular basis of neurological disease. Several key studies have
demonstrated its ability to uncover disease-related biomolecular changes
in rodent models of disease, even if highly localized or invisible
to established histological methods. The high analytical reproducibility
necessary for the biomedical application of mass spectrometry imaging
means it is widely developed in mass spectrometry laboratories. However,
many lack the expertise to correctly annotate the complex anatomy
of brain tissue, or have the capacity to analyze the number of animals
required in preclinical studies, especially considering the significant
variability in sizes of brain regions. To address this issue, we have
developed a pipeline to automatically map mass spectrometry imaging
data sets of mouse brains to the Allen Brain Reference Atlas, which
contains publically available data combining gene expression with
brain anatomical locations. Our pipeline enables facile and rapid
interanimal comparisons by first testing if each animalās tissue
section was sampled at a similar location and enabling the extraction
of the biomolecular signatures from specific brain regions