Manuscript is now available at 10.1101/2022.03.09.483544v1

Web-based Histology Reference Atlas for the Freshwater Crustacean Daphnia magna

Daphnia, an important model system for the study of evolution, development, phenotypic plasticity, and environmental health, lacks a modern reference atlas for microanatomy. To facilitate the comprehensive assessment of phenotypic effects of genes and environment, we created the histology reference atlas for Daphnia (http://daphnia.io/anatomy/), a tractable, interactive web-based tool that provides insight into normal phenotype through vectorized annotations overlaid onto digital histology sections imaged at 40X magnification. Guided by our expert-curated and multimodal informed hierarchical anatomical ontology, we show that this resource can be used to elucidate sex-specific differences of female and male Daphnia magna in each of 3 orthogonal planes, providing new insight for the study of sex-specific traits. It is our intention that this atlas aids in phenotypic anchoring of large-scale biomolecular (multi-omics) data from comparative toxicological studies. Greater access to high-quality histological data may clarify cross-correlations between microanatomic and multi-omic phenotypes caused by genetic variation, environment, and disease across phylogeny.

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