We are pleased to announce the release of Stereo Investigator^® version 2024.1.3, which introduces key updates to offline software licensing. These updates enhance the functionality and ensure uninterrupted use of the software on systems without internet access.

Key Updates

• Offline Licensing Update:
  Reactivation is now required for systems operating without internet connectivity.

• Activation Process:
  To obtain a new offline Activation Key, please fill out this webform. Detailed instructions for completing the offline authorization process will be provided.

• Support Documentation:
  Step-by-step instructions for offline activation are available in the Stereo Investigator User Guide for your convenience.

For additional support or questions, please contact our customer support team at support@mbfbioscience.com.

The post Stereo Investigator Software Update: Version 2024.1.3 appeared first on MBF Bioscience.

We are pleased to announce the release of Microlucida^® version 2024.1.3, which introduces key updates to offline software licensing. These updates enhance the functionality and ensure uninterrupted use of the software on systems without internet access.

Key Updates

• Offline Licensing Update:
  Reactivation is now required for systems operating without internet connectivity.

• Activation Process:
  To obtain a new offline Activation Key, please fill out this webform. Detailed instructions for completing the offline authorization process will be provided.

• Support Documentation:
  Step-by-step instructions for offline activation are available in the Microlucida User Guide for your convenience.

For additional support or questions, please contact our customer support team at support@mbfbioscience.com.

The post Microlucida Software Update: Version 2024.1.3 appeared first on MBF Bioscience.

We are pleased to announce the release of Neurolucida^® version 2024.1.3, which introduces key updates to offline software licensing. These updates enhance the functionality and ensure uninterrupted use of the software on systems without internet access.

Key Updates

• Offline Licensing Update:
  Reactivation is now required for systems operating without internet connectivity.

• Activation Process:
  To obtain a new offline Activation Key, please fill out this webform. Detailed instructions for completing the offline authorization process will be provided.

• Support Documentation:
  Step-by-step instructions for offline activation are available in the Neurolucida User Guide for your convenience.

For additional support or questions, please contact our customer support team at support@mbfbioscience.com.

The post Neurolucida Software Update: Version 2024.1.3 appeared first on MBF Bioscience.

The facial nucleus, present in vertebrate animals, is a group of neurons in the brainstem that receives instructions from neurons in the cortex to direct movement of the muscles of the face. For this paper, the authors characterized the facial nucleus of two similar species, African and Asian elephants, with muscular, dexterous trunks. These species’ faces share many similarities, but have distinctly different ear size and trunk morphology—areas controlled by the facial nucleus. The authors used varied methods, matched to the available elephant material, including Nissl staining, cell counting, axonal osmium tetroxide stains, somata drawings, cell fiber counting, and nerve tracing to examine the facial nucleus in specimens from African (n=4) and Asian elephants (n=4 elephants). Stereo Investigator^® software was used to acquire images of thin sections, conduct stereological procedures, and measure cell size and axon diameter.

Two methods were used to quantify cell populations in the elephant facial nucleus, an unbiased stereology approach and a model-based stereology strategy that consisted of complete counts of cell pieces in every tenth section were used. Using unbiased stereology, the researchers counted ~200-300 cells per specimen with the Stereo Investigator optical fractionator probe. To confirm their results, the research team next counted ~5000–8,000 cells and cell fragments per specimen, then corrected for double-counted cells. The results were equivalent; however, the unbiased stereology approach was much less time consuming.

The researchers found that the facial nucleus in elephants is much larger than in most mammals and it is comprised of approximately five-fold more neurons, but at significantly lower neuronal density. African elephants were found to have more neurons in the medial facial subnucleus than Asian elephants, consistent with their much larger and more expressive ears. Dorsal and lateral facial subnuclei, which control movement of the trunk, were elongated compared to other vertebrate mammals and contained many more neurons than land-based species. Interestingly, these regions had a distinct proximal-to-distal cells size increase. Comparison with other species and between newborn and adult elephants suggest that this increase in size is needed for to support the extreme axonal volumes associated with trunk innervation. These cell-size gradients were found to be a unique feature of the elephant facial nucleus. Finally, the research team identified a high-density motor fovea that they believe are associated with the tip of the trunk in African elephants. Asian and African elephants’ trunks differ in that Asian elephants have one dorsal trunk finger and they tend to engage much of their trunk in grasping objects by wrapping them in their trunks, whereas African elephants’ trunks have dorsal and ventral fingers that are often used to pinch objects. Their work suggests that African elephants have more neurons associated with the trunk tip than do Asian elephants and that control of African elephants’ trunk fingers resides in the motor foveae they identified.

The research described here relied heavily on cell-count data that was most efficiently obtained using the optical fractionator probe in Stereo Investigator^®. The authors found strong relationships between the number, density, and size of neurons and the position and function of elephant facial morphology. Their results pose interesting avenues for future research, including the role of ear movement in “auditory and infrasound perception” and follow-up studies on the cell-size differences found in the putative trunk representation in the facial nucleus and how these differences may be involved with elephants’ presumed need to compensate for inherent nerve conduction delays associated with their large size.

Learn more about industry-leading Stereo Investigator^® systems for image acquisition and stereological studies.

View our webinar that introduces Stereo Investigator^® and unbiased stereology.

Reference:

Kaufmann, L. V., Schneeweiß, U., Maier, E., Hildebrandt, T., & Brecht, M. (2022). Elephant Facial Motor Control. Science Advances, 8(43). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abq2789

The post Unprecedented study reveals structure-function adaptations in the facial nucleus of elephants appeared first on MBF Bioscience.

The file format is used in our products for neuroscience research for important applications such as digital neuron tracing, brain mapping and stereological analyses. MBF Bioscience products, including Neurolucida, Neurolucida 360, Stereo Investigator, Vesselucida 360, and NeuroInfo use this neuromorphological file format.

This file format has evolved over several decades through input and requests from many scientists who’ve been using our products. The current format is truly a collaborative effort between MBF and our users.

“We are very pleased to have received this endorsement from the INCF. It recognizes our ongoing efforts in supporting open and FAIR neuroscience, and our commitment to supporting neuroscience researchers. We’ve established rigorous standards and processes for the file format so that it can be confidently used by the entire research community”, said Jack Glaser, President of MBF Bioscience.

What does this mean for researchers who use MBF products? It expands opportunities for data sharing between individual researchers, laboratories, and within larger collaborative research initiatives. Also, it will be easier for third-party software tools to be developed and maintained that extend the usefulness of the data generated by MBF products.

The official INCF announcement stated, “The committee is pleased to see an open format from a commercial entity go through the endorsement process, and applaud MBF Bioscience for taking this very important step in support of open and FAIR neuroscience. The committee considers the governance process for MBF Bioscience’s neuromorphological file format to be well elaborated, with a sufficient mechanism for the user community to request format updates.”

MBF Bioscience and the INCF will work together to further improve the FAIRness of the standard, including implementation of the governance policy and modification of the standard’s license from the CC-BY-ND-NC to a CC-BY-ND.

The standard number is INCFSN-22-01.

Read the review report, with community feedback in comments: https://f1000research.com/documents/10-712

Read the full INCF endorsement here: https://www.incf.org/blog/incf-endorses-mbf-neuromorphological-file-format

Read a recent publication on the format:

A.E. Sullivan, S. J. Tappan, P. J. Angstman, A. Rodriguez, G. C. Thomas, D. M. Hoppes, M. A. Abdul-Karim, M. L. Heal & Jack R. Glaser. A Comprehensive, FAIR File Format for Neuroanatomical Structure Modeling. Neuroinform (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-021-09530-x

The post INCF endorses the MBF Bioscience neuromorphological file format appeared first on MBF Bioscience.

According to Dr. Jenny, “the 3D capabilities of Neurolucida has made it possible to better understand the distribution of small motoneurons within the motor column, and the patterns of motoneuron dendrites within the spinal cord.” The researchers are interested in comparing the patterns of motoneuron dendritic trees with the known patterns of brain-spinal cord terminal connections.

“We believe a better understanding of the motor column dendritic trees relative to descending supra-spinal inputs can be used to guide rehabilitation efforts in people recovering from stroke or spinal cord injury.”(Jenny, Cheney, 2022)

 © Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Over the last four decades, advances in technology such as injections of anatomical tracers into motoneurons have provided a clearer picture of the entire dendritic tree. Dendritic trees appear to extend outward from the cell body in mostly linear and radial directions before branching. In the current research, only the proximal parts of the dendritic trees were labeled with tracer, but the patterns of the proximal dendrites were similar to the patterns seen with intracellular injections of tracer. The researchers considered the direction of dendrites seen in their material to be a reasonable estimate for the direction of the more distal unlabeled dendrites.

In the current study, the researchers used Neurolucida to digitally reconstruct the neurons from the original microscopic slides from 1983 to perform a detailed 3D analysis of dendritic tree patterns. While they observed dendrites radiating in all directions, this new analysis revealed a preference for two specific directions (either toward the gray matter at the base of the dorsal horn or to the gray matter of the medial ventral horn) suggesting the possibility that motoneuron dendritic trees extend toward functional terminal regions.

The authors plan to use Neurolucida to continue re-examining the motoneuron columns analyzed in the original 1983 study, with the ultimate goal of merging their data with data from other investigations into a 3D neuron database.

Jenny AB, Cheney PD. Monkey flexor and abductor pollicis brevis motoneuron pools: Proximal dendritic trees and small motoneurons. Neuroscience Letters. Vol. 769, 2022 Jan 19. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2021.136429

Jenny AB, Inukai J. Principles of Motor Organization of the Monkey Cervical Spinal Cord. Journal of Neurosci. Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 567-575, 1983 Mar. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/3/3/567.full.pdf

The post Neurolucida helps to reveal new findings in a follow-up to a 40 year old study appeared first on MBF Bioscience.

Representative maps of resistance networks from feed artery to terminal

In a study published in the Journal of Physiology, researchers at the University of Missouri, Columbia, describe short- and long-term capillary damage and recovery after acute skeletal muscle injury. The researchers observed that two to three days after injury, surviving microvessel fragments began to sprout new capillaries, and that five days post-injury new functional capillary networks formed.

In this study, researchers used Vesselucida from MBF Bioscience to characterize changes in skeletal microvasculature throughout a mouse model of muscle injury. 3D reconstructions of injured and recovering vessels in whole-mount preparations of the gluteus maximus muscle at various time points reveal the chronological degeneration and remodeling of the vascular network before and after injury.

“Using Vesselucida, we were able to assess changes in resistance network architecture during muscle regeneration for the first time,” said Dr. Nicole Jacobsen. “We were limited by other imaging methods due to the network size and location of arteriolar networks within skeletal muscle. Vesselucida  uniquely enabled us to reconstruct and analyze intact arteriolar networks in 3 dimensions with micrometer resolution over distances spanning millimeters to centimeters.”

When quantifying segments and overall length of capillaries in Vesselucida, Dr. Jacobsen and her team binned the data based on vessel diameter to consider changes in vasculature of varying sizes. This revealed injury and recovery-related morphological changes in capillaries (five to ten micrometers in diameter), but not in arterioles and venules.

This study is unique in demonstrating significant microvasculature damage and repair in a model of acute injury using thick tissue sections. In previous studies, thin sections have been used selectively to show cross-sections of capillaries with a measurement bias based on their proximity to muscle-cell intersects (Jacobsen, et. al. 2021).

This work demonstrates the unique power of using Vesselucida to trace capillaries and other vessels in thick sections, while avoiding the bias inherent in thin section measurements, to more accurately characterize vascular networks.

Jacobsen NL, Norton CE, Shaw RL, Cornelison D, Segal SS. Myofibre injury induces capillary disruption and regeneration of disorganized microvascular networks. J Physiol. 2021 Nov 11. doi: 10.1113/JP282292.

The post Vesselucida Helps Researchers Quantify Post-Injury Capillary Damage and Regeneration appeared first on MBF Bioscience.

Babies with IUGR may develop health problems such as low resistance to infection. They may also have a hard time handling the stress of a vaginal birth. One possible cause of IUGR is that the fetus is not getting enough nutrients from the placenta.

In order to learn more about the structural differences in placentas in normal versus IUGR pregnancies, scientists at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich used Stereo Investigator to image tissue in both cases–finding that there are indeed quantifiable differences between the two.

One main difference is that the villi, the finger-like structures that allow nutrients and oxygen to flow from the mother to the baby, are smaller in volume in IUGR cases. Of the two types of villi present in a pregnancy, only one type—the contractile villi (the ones with muscle cells in their surrounding sheaths) were smaller. There was no difference in size between non-contractile villi in normal and IUGR placentas.

The figure shows Tukey plots of core clinical and gross anatomic data.

IUGRHowever, in both types of villi in IUGR placentas, the researchers observed reduced blood vessel volume, longer diffusion distances (distance from fetal to maternal blood), and less branching.

To achieve these results, the researchers extracted six tissue samples from 21 placentas (10 normal, 11 IUGR), and used an MBF Bioscience system comprising microscope, motorized stage, camera, z-encoder, and Stereo Investigator to image samples.

“This combination of software and hardware in the Stereo Investigator system makes it possible to image the tissue sections using systematic random sampling and perform unbiased stereology probes to estimate the percent by volume of different components of the placenta, the amount of branching of the villi, and the diffusion distance. The system allows for unbiased estimates in an efficient manner,” says MBF Bioscience Staff Scientist Dr. Dan Peruzzi.

In their study, the Munich researchers combined three Stereo Investigator probes, including the area fraction fractionator probe (used to estimate percentage by volume) and the probe used to measure diffusion distance, in a novel way.

Citation:

Barapatre, N., Kampfer, C., Henschen, S., Schmitz, C., Edler von Koch, F., Frank, H.G., Growth restricted placentas show severely reduced volume of villous components with perivascular myofibroblasts. Placenta, (109) 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.placenta.2021.04.006

The post Differences Associated with Fetal Growth Restriction are Found Using Stereo Investigator appeared first on MBF Bioscience.

Set for release this spring, the new and improved Stereo Investigator will include a new imaging engine, display engine, automatic camera alignment, automatic lens calibration, the double disector, and live video zooming.  

“I’m excited to say that Stereo Investigator keeps getting better in so many ways. What is common among all these new features is increased functionality, more efficiency and better performance,” says MBF Bioscience Product Manager Nathan Liese.  

The new imaging engine will especially help working with large images, whether they are from the SRS image acquisition, confocal or light sheet microscopes. “Users will be amazed by how much faster they can work with their images”, says Nathan. 

The software’s new automatic alignment and calibration features will be game-changers for researchers with large turn over, especially for those working in core facilities and large labs with many users.  

These new features eliminate the time-consuming process of manually aligning the camera and calibrating lenses. The new automatic camera alignment and calibration functionality promises to convert a formerly complex process that previously could take five to 20-minutes, to a simple one that takes a few minutes. 

Two other new features: Double Disector and Live Video Zooming were specific requests from our users, and help make Stereo Investigator an even more comprehensive tool for stereology studies. Double Disector facilitates the counting process in cases where populations of multiple types need to be quantified within the same study, and Live Video Zooming offers the added convenience of digital zooming to examine hard to see objects.  

Overall Stereo Investigator’s new imaging engine and new tracing engine make the software more powerful than ever, with the ability to handle larger images, load data files much faster, open and save files faster, and more effectively use your computer’s resources. 

The post Stereo Investigator Microscope Edition Gets New Imaging Engine, Automatic Alignment, and More appeared first on MBF Bioscience.

A neurodegenerative disorder characterized by late-onset symptoms like depression, confusion, and memory loss, CTE is caused by repeated impacts to the brain. The disease is most often seen in athletes who play high impact sports and military veterans.

While CTE is known to be associated with abnormal aggregations of the tau protein, which is also observed in diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury, no research to date had explored how CTE affected neuron morphology.

In an attempt to get a glimpse into the neurodegenerative mechanisms at work in the CTE brain, researchers at Colorado College quantified the dendritic arborizations of supragranular pyramidal neurons in two regions of the human brain — the frontal and occipital lobes.

Using Neurolucida to reconstruct Golgi-stained neurons from these two regions in 16 human brains (11 cases with CTE and 5 control cases without the disease), a team of researchers led by Dr. Bob Jacobs, observed a general degeneration and greater variability between dendritic systems in CTE brains compared to controls.

Representative Neurolucida tracings of pyramidal neurons in the frontal and occipital lobes from control and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) groups. CTE tracings show greater variability in dendritic extent compared to control tracings.

According to the study, the dendritic systems of CTE brains showed reductions in seven different measures — dendritic volume, total dendritic length, mean segment length, dendritic segment count, dendritic spine number, and dendritic spine density, as well as dendritic diameter. In contrast to the occipital lobe, dendritic apathy and loss was more severe in the frontal lobe, where p-tau is known to aggregate, possibly acting as a mechanism associated with this pathology, according to the paper.

The researchers also observed a greater variability of morphological differences between dendritic systems in the CTE brains as compared to controls, which were more uniform in size and branching patterns. As outlined in the paper, this variability among neurons in CTE brains might be a result of a combination of the disease’s degenerative effects as well as reorganizational efforts to compensate for the damage.

“This study is the first to document changes in cortical dendritic systems in CTE subjects, which sheds light on an entirely different realm of CTE related neural alterations,” said Dr. Jacobs. “These dendritic changes are probably associated with at least some of the cognitive changes one sees in CTE as well.”

While the authors point out that dendritic degeneration is a normal process in the aging brain, they also explain that their observations of CTE brains in comparison to similarly aged non-CTE brains reveal a possible acceleration in dendritic loss when CTE is present.

Over the course of their study, the scientists traced 640 Golgi-stained neurons with Neurolucida.

“Neurolucida was very effective for this study. The software has come a long way in the last 30 years and has become much easier to use,” said Dr. Jacobs, who, over the course of his career, has traced over 5,000 neurons across 26 different species with the help of Neurolucida.

“I would not have had a research career without the Neurolucida system and the wonderful support of MBF over the years,” he said.

The post Researchers Observe Altered Neuropathology in CTE Brains appeared first on MBF Bioscience.