The HoneyBee Standard Brain (HSB) – a versatile atlas tool for integrating data and data exchange in the neuroscience community

The HoneyBee Standard Brain (HSB) serves as an interactive tool for comparing morphologies of bee brain neurons and relates it to functional as well as biological properties [1]. Recent efforts by several labs have accumulated confocal image stacks from extraand intracellular stained neurons in the bee central nervous system [2]. We present a pipeline through which confocal images of neurons can be traced and presented in a common space (Figure 1). The first step is an automatic extraction of the neuron's skeleton based on threshold segmentation. In a second step this skeleton can be edited using semi-automatic and interactive tools within Amira's Filament Editor. Hereby, the user is assisted by displaying maximum intensity projections and 3D representations in two separate viewers. Next the skeletonized neuron can be labeled (i.e. annotated) by using multiple sets of hierarchically organized label attributes (Figure 2). Finally, the neuron's topological and metric features can be visualized, statistically analyzed and/or exported to a simulation package such as Neuron.