Abstract
Understanding how nervous systems mediate responses to sensation requires whole-body maps of periphery-to-brain connections. Octopuses exemplify this challenge with distributed control of eight arms and hundreds of suckers, yet their long-range microanatomical wiring remains elusive due to limitations in microscopy. We extend histotomography (Ding et al. 2019), a form of soft tissue microCT customized for volumetric characterization of cells and tissues, to centimeter range with a custom micro-CT imaging system (Ding et al., 2019). With its 10-mm field of view and 0.7-μm isotropic voxels we created a high-resolution digital intact small octopus. This multi-tissue 3D blueprint enabled us to (i) elucidate previously uncharacterized chemotactile pathways from the suckers to the brain, (ii) discern subdivisions of the nerve ring connecting neighboring arms, and (iii) segment over 300 structures across organ systems at histology-like resolution. We release the labeled interactive digital specimen to facilitate collaborative whole-organism phenotyping as a practical foundation for digital organismal biology.
Authors
Andrew Sugarman1,2*, Daniel Vanselow1*, Stephen L. Senft9, Carolyn Zaino1, Maksim A. Yakovlev1, David Northover1,2, Justin D. Silverman2,3,4,5,6, Mee S. Ngu1, Khai C. Ang1, Steve Wang7, Patrick La Riviere8, Roger T. Hanlon9, Keith C. Cheng1,2,6
*Authors contributed equally
1Department of Pathology, Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA; The Jake Gittlen Laboratories for Cancer Research, Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA
2Program in Bioinformatics and Genomics, Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, USA
3College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, USA
4Department of Statistics, Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, USA
5Department of Medicine, Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA
6Institute for Computational and Data Science, Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, USA
7Mobile Imaging Innovations, Inc., Palatine, Illinois, USA
8Department of Radiology, The University of Chicago, USA
9The Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA, 02543, USA