Histological Brain Anatomy
Coronal cresyl-violet sections of the spiny mouse brain in stereotaxic coordinates — Vitorino et al. 2022, J Comp Neurol.
The Vitorino lab at the University of Algarve published a 42-plate coronal histology atlas of the African spiny mouse brain in the Journal of Comparative Neurology in 2022. The plates span the brain from +4.15 mm to −7 mm relative to bregma, spaced 240 µm apart, each section paired with a labeled line drawing and an abbreviation key. The stereotaxic coordinates were experimentally validated with a Parkinsonian striatal lesion and corticospinal-tract labeling.
It complements the MRI atlas on this site: the MRI atlas gives a 3D volume in any plane with broad anatomical regions; the Vitorino atlas gives fine cellular architecture in coronal sections with the stereotaxic coordinates used for surgery.
Read the article
Vitorino et al. 2022 on Wiley Online Library. Institutional access required.
DOI: 10.1002/cne.25329
Supplementary plates (PDF)
The 42-plate atlas as supplementary material on the publisher's site. Same access requirements as the article.
Citation
Vitorino, M., Simão, S., Moreira, J. B., Nogueira-Rodrigues, J., Silva, J., Lourenço, A. S., Fernandes, V., Sousa, M. M., Tiscornia, G., & Araújo, I. M. (2022). Coronal brain atlas in stereotaxic coordinates of the African spiny mouse, Acomys cahirinus. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 530(12), 2215–2237. https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.25329
Why aren't the plates shown here?
The Vitorino atlas is published under standard Wiley copyright, not an open Creative Commons license, so the figure images cannot be re-hosted here without explicit permission. Use the links above to access the plates through the publisher.
The source repository includes a scripts/build_local_histology.py helper that builds a private
per-plate browser from a personal copy of the supplementary materials — it is never deployed to this site.