Hannsjörg Schröder - Neuroanatomy of the Mouse: An Introduction

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This book came into being based on teaching rodent neuroanatomy to B.Sc. students of our local Neuroscience program ( http://www.neuroscience.uni-koeln.de/ ) which started more than 10 years ago. Since there was no book available suited for the beginners, the project started with a number of handouts and transparencies. Although or because the number of neuroanatomists in the classical sense is steadily decreasing, a basic understanding of the neuroanatomy of the mouse, an important model system of human diseases, is essential to researchers in the neurosciences, pharmaceutics, and human or veterinary medicine. The lack of introductory literature gave us the idea to conserve our accumulated knowledge in a book accessible to researchers and freshmen from different disciplines.

This, in turn, led to the idea to find a publisher that would be interested in a book on mouse neuroanatomy for freshmen. Fortunately, Springer was directly interested, and the material was revised according to this new concept not available on the market, so far. In this vein, I would like to very much thank Dr. Ina Stoeck and Wilma McHugh who cared for this book at Springer for the trusting cooperation.

The authors aimed to develop a book that is helpful for all those who make their first contact with mouse neuroanatomy. For this reason, each of the 15 chapters contains those facts, developments, and current topics in neurobiology that in our opinion are of particular importance for the understanding of mouse models for human diseases. For this reason, we have, wherever reasonable, included comparative aspects related to human neuroanatomy. Each of the chapters starts with learning goals and a list containing the most important topics covered in the chapter. This is followed by a summarizing paragraph of the basic information on the individual parts of the brain and their development. Subsequently, the different parts of the respective brain structure are described, and their functional aspects are explained. In this context, we would like to mention that the list of references of this topic is up to date but is far from being complete. The whole scientific field is rising, and the body of original publications feels overwhelming. Nevertheless, we did our best to include all the necessary references with special respect to, whenever possible, mouse-specific data and the specification of the mouse strains investigated. The text is complemented by a balanced selection of relevant photographs, microphotographs, graphics, and tables.

While this book provides basic but essential knowledge on the mouse neuroananatomy, more information on the molecular basis of the mouse brain and its development can be found in Watson et al. (2012). We furthermore advise the interested reader to consult a stereotaxic atlas for additional and detailed morphological data on the mouse brain, e.g., Paxinos and Franklin (2012).

The list of neuroanatomical structures dealt with in this book has been taken from the BrainNavigator and modified (Paxinos and Watson 2009). This list does not provide the Latin terminology which has been taken mainly from the Terminologia Neuroanatomica and Nomina Anatomica Veterinaria (for details, see Sect.). The cross-references between structures dealt with in individual chapters are indicated by the sign .

There is no book without errors or gaps in the content. We encourage the readers of this book to contact us whenever they find errors or topics not covered appropriately. All these issues will be considered in the revised edition.