For evolutionary neuroanatomists who examine various animal brains, entry to a gold mine of 500,000 histological sections and complete mounts is now solely a mouse-click away.
The R. Glenn Northcutt Assortment of Comparative Vertebrate Neuroanatomy and Embryology at Harvard College—which includes 33,000 slides of tissue samples from greater than 240 vertebrate genera—is without doubt one of the world’s largest and most various collections of its variety. Northcutt, a prolific comparative vertebrate neuroanatomist and emeritus professor of neurosciences on the College of California, San Diego, amassed the gathering over the course of 5 a long time. Since 2021, James Hanken, analysis professor of biology at Harvard College and curator on the Museum of Comparative Zoology, has led an effort to digitize it.
The scanning course of continues to be ongoing and will take one other two years to finish, Hanken says, however greater than 8,000 slides are already publicly obtainable in two on-line knowledge repositories: MCZBase and MorphoSource.
A complete stock of all the assortment seems in a paper Hanken and his colleagues printed final week within the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. It gives researchers with an in-depth information for utilizing the gathering, Hanken says.
Few different sources of this sort can be found on-line to researchers excited by evolutionary biology and mind anatomy, says Andrew Iwaniuk, professor of neuroscience on the College of Lethbridge. For instance, neither the Welker Comparative Anatomy Assortment nor the Starr Assortment, each housed on the U.S. Nationwide Museum of Well being and Drugs in Silver Spring, Maryland, can be found on-line. To entry slide collections corresponding to these, scientists have needed to journey to see them in particular person, which could be troublesome for these outdoors the US, Iwaniuk provides.
“Nowadays, there’s an increasing number of individuals [who] are excited by these massive evolutionary questions with regards to the nervous system,” he says. “These kinds of questions can actually solely be greatest answered by having these broad comparative anatomical collections that take a lifetime to assemble.”
