Variability of IO dendritic morphology
We used a sparse viral labeling technique to induce strong fluorescent labeling in a small number of neurons in a given IO (Fig. 1a, b) as well as IO neurons that were labeled using either Alexa (488 or 594) or Biocytin during in vitro patch-clamp experiments (see “Methods”). Confocal image stacks were acquired from the labeled tissue and a total of 90 manually reconstructed morphologies were analyzed (see “Methods”). Except for two neurons from the dorsal cap of Kooy (DCK)-subnucleus (which has been shown to be phenotypically distinct from the main IO subnuclei; Urbano et al. 2006), neurons from all IO subnuclei were included in our analyses. The different methods of neuronal labeling lead to some variability in the quality of the confocal image stacks; specifically, the viral-labeled material was of higher quality regarding the ratio between signal strength and background noise. Nonetheless, qualitative differences between morphologies reconstructed from the differently labeled materials were not immediately apparent (see Fig. 1c–f). To exemplify morphologies from each of the three data sets, Fig. 1c–e show maximal Z-projections of confocal stacks from viral-, Alexa- and biocytin-labeled data, respectively; the corresponding reconstructed morphologies are shown in the left column in Fig. 1f. Additional examples of morphologies reconstructed from the three datasets are shown in the middle and right columns of Fig. 1f, indicating a progression from “very curly” (left column) to “very straight” (right column) morphologies in each of the three data sets.
Examining the full morphological library, both “clearly curly” (30 out of 90; Fig. 1f, left column) and “clearly straight” morphologies (16 out of 90; Fig. 1f, right column) could be subjectively identified. However, categorical distinction was ambiguous, as a significant portion of the morphologies could not be easily classified (44 out of 90; examples are shown in Fig. 1f, middle column).
It has been previously considered that IO neurons with subjectively straight and curly appearance would be anatomically segregated into different parts of the olivary nucleus (Scheibel and Scheibel 1955; Ruigrok et al. 1990). However, we found that “curly” and “straight” neurons could be found within each of the main IO subnuclei. This is demonstrated in Fig. 1g, where morphologies from different sources are shown at their anatomical locations approximated at two different levels of the anterio-posterior axis (see “Methods”). These results demonstrate extensive morphological heterogeneity in IO neuron dendritic morphologies across all subdivisions of the nucleus.
Quantitative analyses reveal a continuum in neuronal morphology
While the ambiguity of dendritic morphologies seemed to rule out clear classification, we investigated whether features distinguishing between IO cell classes could be revealed using a quantitative approach. To this end we measured 25 morphometric parameters from each of the reconstructed neurons (see Table 1 and “Methods” for measurement definitions). The measured parameters included basic ones such as the number of dendrite stems, number of branches, dendritic path length and maximal reach (see Fig. 2a). We also measured a number of parameters aimed at describing the overall shape of the dendritic trees; most prominent among these (as explained below) is “straightness”, which was defined as maximal reach divided by the longest single dendrite path length.
Table 2 Significance of group-level differences in mean (left column) and variance (right column)
Examining the distributions of morphological parameter values, we noted that there are some differences between the three groups of neurons reconstructed from material obtained using different labeling methods. The outcome of statistical tests performed to assess differences across groups are summarized in Table 2 and show that group means were significantly different on almost all measures. Thus, we performed quantitative analyses of morphometric measures on each of the three data sets separately.
In an ideal and simple case, a distinction between groups is implied by a clear bi- or multimodal distribution in one or more features. However, we observed no immediately apparent groupings in the distributions of any of the measured parameters. To exemplify the variability in morphological parameter distributions, histograms of maximal reach, number of stems, number of branches, total dendrite length and straightness are shown in Fig. 2b–e for each data set as indicated in the legend, demonstrating that there are no clear multimodal distributions in any of the data sets. Nonetheless, it was evident that IO neurons do not form a single population with normally distributed inter-individual variability: as shown in Table 3, we found that in each data set, the null-hypothesis that data are sampled from a single normal distribution should be rejected for almost all measures except number of stems and local bifurcation angle. To enumerate the distributions of the measured morphological parameters, Table 4 displays the minimal, mean, median and maximal values of each parameter distribution in each data set. Taken together, while we should conclude that the observed morphological heterogeneity is unlikely to result from normally distributed inter-individual variability in a single neuronal population, we did not find any single morphometric parameter that would clearly distinguish between morphologically different classes of neurons.
Table 3 Likelihoods of normality
Table 4 Minimal, median, mean, and maximal values of each morphological parameter distribution as indicated in each row, for each of the three data sets as indicated above the columns
We then asked which of the objectively defined morphological parameters could best be used to describe the subjectively perceived range of variability from “curly” to “straight” by calculating the Spearman correlation between the subjectively assigned categories (curly, ambiguous and straight) and each of the measured parameters (Table 5, left side). Of all the different measures describing dendritic tree shape, straightness best corresponded to our subjective categorization across all three datasets; therefore, we chose this measure as an objective representation of a neuron’s position along the curly–straight continuum. Notably, besides measures directly aimed at describing the dendritic tree shape we found that in each data set at least one other measure was also correlated with the subjectively assigned classes (see Table 5); for example, in all three datasets the number of dendrite tips was significantly correlated with subjective class such that the “straight” neurons had the fewest tips. Similarly, these correlations could be found with the straightness-parameter instead of subjective class; for example, the number of stems and branches are strongly correlated both to subjective class and straightness in the viral- and Alexa-labeled datasets (see Table 5). Correlation statistics between straightness and all other morphometric parameters are reported on the right side in Table 5, and as examples, correlations of straightness to the number of stems, branches and total length are shown in Fig. 2f–h for the data obtained from viral-labeled morphologies; correlations between these parameters in the other two data sets follow the same trends and are shown in Supplementary Fig. 1.
Table 5 Correlations between morphometric measures and subjective classification (left) and straightness (right)
Taking another approach to assessing which properties might best distinguish “curly” from “straight” morphologies we performed principal component analysis (PCA) and K-means clustering on the quantified morphological data (see “Methods”). If distinct morphological classes could be defined based on a combination of parameters, then dimensionality reduction of the data through PCA would result in a gap between groups of data points belonging to different classes. Due to the previously mentioned quantitative differences between the three data sets, the PCA-decomposition and K-means clustering results also vary quantitatively across data sets; nonetheless, the obtained results were qualitatively similar in each case, and are shown for viral-labeled data in Fig. 3 while the results of the same analyses performed on the patch-filled data sets are provided in Supplementary Fig. 2.
As shown in Fig. 3a, we found that a clear gap between groups of data points did not become apparent in the distribution of the data along the first two principal components (PC1 and PC2) of the PCA-decomposed morphometric data. To get an objective distinction into two groups despite this result, we applied a K-means clustering algorithm to the data as represented along the principal component axes (see “Methods”) and found that the algorithmic distinction between groups was defined almost exclusively along PC1; this is shown in Fig. 3a by the almost vertical grey dashed line marking the border between the two clusters. More than that, PC1 appeared to follow our subjective classification of the IO neuron morphological types; this is apparent in Fig. 3a in that most morphologies that were subjectively classified as being “curly” are found on the left side, while subjectively “straight” morphologies are all found on the right and “ambiguous” morphologies are mostly in between. Thus, it seems that PC1 closely follows the curly-to-straight continuum, and that “curly” and “straight” are indeed relevant descriptors of the morphological variability among IO neurons, i.e., a classification based on features unrelated to morphological “straightness” was not found. This idea was also reflected in the strong and significant correlation between PC1 and straightness (Fig. 3b, Rho = 0.84, p < 0.0001).
Our quantified morphometric data set contains multiple parameters aimed at describing the overall shape of dendritic trees; such parameters are correlated with each other by definition, and this may artificially cause the main principal component to follow measures of dendritic tree shape. However, as depicted in Fig. 3c where the relative contribution of each measure to the first two PCs is displayed on a scale from 0 to 1 for the viral-labeled morphologies, measures such as the number of stems and branches also contributed strongly to the separation along PC1. This shows that properties not directly describing dendritic tree shape also vary systematically with the measured straightness of the morphologies, and further strengthens our confidence that the curly–straight axis is the most relevant descriptor of morphological variability in the IO neuron population.
Taken together, the results described so far do not support the idea that IO neurons could or should be classified into subtypes based on their morphological appearance. Furthermore, these results indicate that a description of the morphological variability based on the simple straightness-measure is as informative as a description based on a decomposition of the quantified data.
Non-isomorphic IO dendrite fields
Non-isomorphic, or “pyriform” IO neuron dendritic fields have been described as early as the anatomical work of Ramón y Cajal (first published between 1905 and 1911); however, it has been assumed that such directionality arises only in the proximity of borders of the IO or its different subnuclei and that IO neurons residing within the main IO volume have roughly spherical shapes with somata surrounded by dendrites on all sides (Ramón y Cajal 1995; Scheibel and Scheibel 1955). Contrary to this description we found that neurons with directionally extended dendritic trees were also regularly encountered at distances far (> 75 µm) removed from boundaries of IO subnuclei (see Fig. 1a, g). In the following paragraphs we present two descriptors of dendritic directionality in IO neurons, one pertaining to the distribution of dendrites within the 3D volume occupied by the neuron (Fig. 4a), and one pertaining to the location of the soma within the dendritic volume (Fig. 4b). As no more correlation statistics will be presented, data acquired using different labeling methods are shown overlaid in the same panel, using different symbols to mark the different data sets as indicated.
There are two distinct ways in which the dendritic arrangement of an individual IO neuron can be non-homogeneous. First, the neuron’s dendrites are not distributed evenly within a spherical volume. We quantified this by performing PCA on the x-, y-, z-coordinates of the dendritic tree of each individual morphology. The relative proportions of variance explained along each of the three principal components (PCs) of a decomposed morphology represent the “stretchedness” of the dendritic tree along the axes of 3D space; if dendrites are distributed evenly within a spherical volume, each PC would explain 33% of the variance. Figure 4a shows that a large portion of neurons occupy a highly uneven volume with the first PC explaining more than 60% of their ‘variance in space’, whereas very few neurons are even roughly spherically shaped. As the examples shown in Fig. 4d illustrate, there is a continuum of dendritic tree shapes ranging from spherical (orange, red, and pink examples) to ellipsoid (green) to conical (blue) and even flat (cyan) morphologies. Notably, while the “straightest” morphologies were almost always highly elongated (see positions of examples 7–9 from Fig. 1 and the examples marked with blue and cyan in Fig. 4d), very “curly” morphologies also tended to have elongated shapes (see Fig. 1, example 3 and the example marked with green in Fig. 4d).
Second, IO neuron somata are usually not located in the center of mass (CoM) of the dendrites; instead, we found that in more than 90% of all neurons the shortest distance between the soma and the border of the volume they occupy (soma-border (SB) distance) is smaller than the soma-CoM distance (Fig. 4b). This means that IO neuron dendrites do not uniformly occupy the space around the soma, but instead extend into a preferred direction. In contrast to the directionality of the overall dendritic mass, the directionality in the positioning of dendrite stems on the soma is distributed randomly (Fig. 4c), so that directionality arises because dendrites take a sharp turn as they emerge from the soma and branch profusely only in the main direction.
Taken together, these results show that IO neuron dendritic trees are directional and indicate that this directionality is a relevant feature of the network’s architecture.
Influence of dendrite directionality on network connectivity
As a final step in this anatomical investigation, we examined how the morphological variability and dendritic directionality might interplay in determining connectivity in the IO network. To this end, we first examined the distribution of IO neuron somata within the volume of the nucleus by manually reconstructing all 11,800 somata from one side of an entire rostro-caudal extent of an IO (Fig. 5a, “Methods”). While we found that the distribution of IO neuron somata is less homogeneous than would be expected if they were distributed uniformly within the IO volume (Fig. 5b), the inhomogeneities in the somata distribution were too weak to define anatomically segregated groups of neurons based on inter-soma distances alone. In fact, distance-based algorithmic clustering of somata showed that anatomically, somata are all grouped together into a single large cluster for inter-soma distances as small as 40 µm (Fig. 5c). Since all reconstructed morphologies have a reach of at least 35 µm, and the majority reach beyond 100 µm (see Fig. 2b), this result would indicate that IO neurons form a single, large interconnected mesh network. However, this assessment does not take into consideration that IO neuron dendritic trees can be strongly directional, as described in the previous paragraphs.
What connectivity properties may be bestowed on the IO network by the directionality in dendritic trees? We obtained data indicative of an answer to this question in experiments where labeling was less sparse than described so far, allowing us to occasionally visualize pairs or groups of neighboring neurons. In this material we observed that pairs of neighboring, directional morphologies were arranged such that their dendritic fields either expressly overlapped (Fig. 6a) or avoided each other nearly entirely (Fig. 6b). Furthermore, in rare cases where many nearby neurons could be reconstructed, their dendrites extensively overlapped and somata were located at the outer rim of the group of neurons (Fig. 6c). Thus, an attractive possibility is that the directionality of IO neuron dendritic trees, as well as their varying dendritic tree shapes, delineate anatomically segregated areas of mostly dense or more sparse connectivity.