Modelling brain-wide neuronal morphology via rooted Cayley trees

Sci Rep. 2018 Oct 23;8(1):15666. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-34050-1.

Abstract

Neuronal morphology is an essential element for brain activity and function. We take advantage of current availability of brain-wide neuron digital reconstructions of the Pyramidal cells from a mouse brain, and analyze several emergent features of brain-wide neuronal morphology. We observe that axonal trees are self-affine while dendritic trees are self-similar. We also show that tree size appear to be random, independent of the number of dendrites within single neurons. Moreover, we consider inhomogeneous branching model which stochastically generates rooted 3-Cayley trees for the brain-wide neuron topology. Based on estimated order-dependent branching probability from actual axonal and dendritic trees, our inhomogeneous model quantitatively captures a number of topological features including size and shape of both axons and dendrites. This sheds lights on a universal mechanism behind the topological formation of brain-wide axonal and dendritic trees.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Brain / anatomy & histology*
  • Brain / cytology*
  • Computer Simulation
  • Mice, Inbred C57BL
  • Models, Neurological
  • Neurons / cytology*
  • Stochastic Processes