
==== Front
bioRxiv
BIORXIV
bioRxiv
2692-8205
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

10.1101/2024.08.16.607981
preprint
1
Article
Whole-brain mapping in adult zebrafish and identification of a novel tank test functional connectome
Rajput Neha http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0565-0945

Parikh Kush
Squires Ada
Fields Kailyn K. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5080-390X

Wong Matheu
Kanani Dea
Kenney Justin W. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8790-5184

19 8 2024
2024.08.16.607981https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use.
http://biorxiv.org/lookup/doi/10.1101/2024.08.16.607981
nihpp-2024.08.16.607981.pdf
Abstract

Identifying general principles of brain function requires the study of structure-function relationships in a variety of species. Zebrafish have recently gained prominence as a model organism in neuroscience, yielding important insights into vertebrate brain function. Although methods have been developed for mapping neural activity in larval animals, we lack similar techniques for adult zebrafish that have the advantage of a fully developed neuroanatomy and larger behavioral repertoire. Here, we describe a pipeline built around open-source tools for whole-brain activity mapping in freely swimming adult zebrafish. Our pipeline combines recent advances in histology, microscopy, and machine learning to capture cfos activity across the entirety of the adult brain. Images captured using light-sheet microscopy are registered to the recently created adult zebrafish brain atlas (AZBA) for automated segmentation using advanced normalization tools (ANTs). We used our pipeline to measure brain activity after zebrafish were subject to the novel tank test. We found that cfos levels peaked 15 minutes following behavior and that several regions containing serotoninergic, dopaminergic, noradrenergic, and cholinergic neurons were active during exploration. Finally, we generated a novel tank test functional connectome. Functional network analysis revealed that several regions of the medial ventral telencephalon form a cohesive sub-network during exploration. We also found that the anterior portion of the parvocellular preoptic nucleus (PPa) serves as a key connection between the ventral telencephalon and many other parts of the brain. Taken together, our work enables whole-brain activity mapping in adult zebrafish for the first time while providing insight into neural basis for the novel tank test.
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pmc
