Whole-brain activity mapping onto a zebrafish brain atlas

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Neuroanatomy
• Systems Neuroscience

Background:

• Localizing neural circuits is crucial for understanding behavior generation.
• Existing methods lack comprehensive anatomical mapping of neural activity.
• Larval zebrafish offer a tractable model for systems neuroscience studies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an open-source, expandable brain atlas for larval zebrafish (Z-Brain).
• To create a high-throughput system for mapping stimulus- and behavior-dependent neural activity.
• To correlate neural activity with specific behaviors and stimuli in vivo.

Main Methods:

• Brain registration across hundreds of larval zebrafish to build the Z-Brain atlas.
• Immunohistochemical detection of phosphorylated extracellular signal–regulated kinase (ERK) as a neural activity readout.
• Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAP)-mapping assay performed on freely swimming fish.

Main Results:

• Developed the Z-Brain, an open-source atlas with molecular labels and anatomical definitions.
• Established a technically simple, automated MAP-mapping assay for neural activity.
• Generated whole-brain activity maps for pharmacological, visual, noxious stimuli, hunting, and feeding behaviors.

Conclusions:

• The MAP-mapping assay provides a high-throughput method for studying neural circuits underlying behavior.
• The Z-Brain atlas and MAP-mapping system enable comprehensive contextualization of neural activity.
• This approach is broadly applicable to diverse stimuli and behaviors in neuroscience research.