FIGURE 4.

Subcellular locations of fluorescent proteins for whole-brain applications. (A) Cytosolic targeting with spatially dense labeling is suitable for extracting coarse morphological features such as dendritic or axonal density of a particular cell type. Discontinuities of the fluorescent signal in distal thin processes and too dense labeling make this approach unsuitable for morphological reconstructions. (B) Nuclear targeting with spatially dense labeling is suitable for counting complete cell-type populations. (C) Plasma membrane targeting with spatially sparse labeling is suitable for full morphological reconstructions. (D) Combining the two previous strategies is suitable for linking soma spatial distribution with morphological features of single neurons. However, this strategy has not been fully explored due to the lack of transgenic mice that combine both labels.