Overview Intorduction and Overview Atlases of normal mouse development have immense pedagogical value and provide researchers studying normal, mutant, and transgenic mice a standard against which specific examples may be compared and contrasted. This method can be used to image both fixed and live specimens. Moreover, unique contrast mechanisms can be exploited to highlight different features of the specimens. Standard methods of atlas construction typically involve sacrificing, fixing, sectioning, staining, and then recording photomicrographs of individual sections.
Photographic plates are the raw material of most atlases.
These restrictions make it difficult to follow complex three-dimensional structures and hinder comparison of one's own 'oblique' sections with the 'orthogonal' sections found in the atlases. Digital atlases have the potential to obviate both of these vexing problems. With the section data reconstructed into three dimensions, highlighting complex structures and computationally sectioning at arbitrary angles becomes possible. Temporal and spatial gene and protein expression patterns, axonal trajectories, patterns of vasculature, and specific neuronal responses to stimuli can all be combined to obtain a canonical organism or system. Such a data set could potentially embody all quantitative information known about the animal in a concise framework.