The Beagle Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates

Abstract

An illustration is the only means by which one can hope to understand the organization of nerve tracts and the morphology of the nuclei that compose the central nervous system, and serial cross sections can help students imagine what the whole three-dimensional picture looks like. Yet a lack of readily available published data for the dog was underlined at the 2008 European Society of Toxicologic Pathology congress held in Edinburgh, as the most recognized book from Marcus Singer dated from 1962 and was out of print. The probable reason for the lack of such data is the difficulty in obtaining good histologic sections of large brain specimens and the expense of production, not only for histotechnology, but also for the lengthy research on structures and terminology. Considering that the beagle dog is routinely used in toxicology as a non rodent species and more broadly in the field of neuroscience research, the idea of building a new reference in the field arose, in the hope that an up-to-date and readily available atlas could decrease the need to use dogs as controls or for teaching purposes. Moreover, the work could serve as a guide to understand the comparative brain structure of other mammals, because although some important differences do exist, particularly in the nomenclature of the cortical sulci and gyri, the similarity of the arrangement of nuclei and tracts is striking.