{"doi":"10.1242/dev.188631","title":"A landmark-free morphometrics pipeline for high-resolution phenotyping: application to a mouse model of Down syndrome","abstract":"Characterising phenotypes often requires quantification of anatomical shape. Quantitative shape comparison (morphometrics) traditionally uses manually located landmarks and is limited by landmark number and operator accuracy. Here, we apply a landmark-free method to characterise the craniofacial skeletal phenotype of the Dp1Tyb mouse model of Down syndrome and a population of the Diversity Outbred (DO) mouse model, comparing it with a landmark-based approach. We identified cranial dysmorphologies in Dp1Tyb mice, especially smaller size and brachycephaly (front-back shortening), homologous to the human phenotype. Shape variation in the DO mice was partly attributable to allometry (size-dependent shape variation) and sexual dimorphism. The landmark-free method performed as well as, or better than, the landmark-based method but was less labour-intensive, required less user training and, uniquely, enabled fine mapping of local differences as planar expansion or shrinkage. Its higher resolution pinpointed reductions in interior mid-snout structures and occipital bones in both the models that were not otherwise apparent. We propose that this landmark-free pipeline could make morphometrics widely accessible beyond its traditional niches in zoology and palaeontology, especially in characterising developmental mutant phenotypes.","journal":"Development","year":2021,"id":157147,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":51,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9505,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":664170,"name":"Yushi Redhead","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":663407,"name":"Marta Vidal‐García","orcid":"0000-0001-7617-7329","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":320961,"name":"Lucas Lo Vercio","orcid":"0000-0002-5465-6801","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":320960,"name":"Wei Liu","orcid":"0000-0002-3865-8145","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":238175,"name":"Elizabeth Fisher","orcid":"0000-0003-2850-9936","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":278317,"name":"Benedikt Hallgrímsson","orcid":"0000-0002-7192-9103","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":270081,"name":"Victor L. J. Tybulewicz","orcid":"0000-0003-2439-0798","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":663408,"name":"Julia A. Schnabel","orcid":"0000-0001-6107-3009","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":663409,"name":"Jeremy Green","orcid":"0000-0002-6102-2620","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":663406,"name":"Nicolas Toussaint","orcid":"0000-0003-4696-465X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":75,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:44:17.471040Z","pmid":"33712441","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}