Spatial Transcriptomics resolution of singing female canary brains
Determining the level of organization at which changes in brain segmentation occur is crucial for identifying the underlying mechanisms and gaining a comprehensive understanding of adult brain plasticity. To address this, we tracked the testosterone-induced changes in the adult female canary song control nucleus, HVC, using in vivo 2-photon imaging of pre-labeled neurons throughout song development over several weeks. The testosterone effect was parallelly investigated by performing spatial transcriptomics (10X genomics Visium Spatial Gene Expression) of HVCs from testosterone- and placebo-treated birds. Hence, we aim to study the discrepancy between the observed HVC volume described by imaging methods and the HVC size reported in traditional histology after testosterone treatments.