New Technology Lets Scientists See the Brain with Nanoscale Resolution
Neuroscientists have begun testing the most powerful brain imaging technology ever created, and it’s already helped them answers questions about how connections form in our most complex organ.
The new imaging tool allows researchers to probe into every nook and cranny of the brain and then use the data to produce images at the nanoscale, like the one in the video at the link.
A large collective of researchers at Harvard, John Hopkins, and other institutions tested out the new technology by inspecting a mouse’s neocortex, according to a paper published Thursday in Cell. With such detailed imaging, every cellular object in the mouse’s neocortex (that would be the axons, dendrites, and glia, if you haven’t had a biology refresher in a while) were distinguishable and most of the sub-cellular components, such as synapses and spines, were visible as well.
"The complexity of the brain is much more than what we had ever imagined," said lead author Narayanan "Bobby" Kasthuri, of the Boston University School of Medicine, in a press release. "We had this clean idea of how there's a really nice order to how neurons connect with each other, but if you actually look at the material it's not like that. The connections are so messy that it's hard to imagine a plan to it, but we checked and there's clearly a pattern that cannot be explained by randomness."
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I believe this write-up and video were put together by different members of the same collective, the video accompanies the write-up - from MedicalXpress:
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Getting to step one was a yearlong process.
"This paper took somewhere between five and six years to complete," Lichtman said. "Much of that time was devoted to inventing the pipeline we use to capture these images. That required developing a means of cutting brain very thin, collecting the brain sections, and using this tape-based method that had not been used previously."
With the system in place, Lichtman and colleagues set about using electron microscopes to capture images of tissue and shaping a method to trace cells through the various layers, allowing researchers to reconstruct axons, dendrites, and synapses into 3-D images. The images were also used to build a database that was mined for insights into neuron connectivity.
"What this paper describes is the pipeline where we start with a physical piece of brain and end up at the other end with a digital brain," Lichtman said. "It's been digitized and is minable, so you can look at this digital brain sample over and over again without having to dissect a real brain for each new question."
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