Health & Medicine
Real-Time Whole Brain Neuronal Activity Imaging is Becoming Possible With New Technology
Mark Hoffman
First Posted: Mar 19, 2013 04:10 PM EDT
A new imaging technology is so fast and has such a high resolution that it can show the activity of single neurons firing in a brain. Neuroscientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute have used this to map the activity of nearly all the neurons in a vertebrate brain at cellular resolution at once, with could have signficant implications in the near future for neuroscience research and projects like the proposed Brain Activity Map (BAM).
The technology used by the researchers is called high-speed light sheet microscopy. They successfully visualized the activity of 80% of the neurons in the brain (which is composed of ~100,000 neurons) of a fish larva at a frequency of 0.8 Hz (an image every 1.3 seconds), with single-cell resolution.
This represents the first technology that achieves whole brain imaging of a vertebrate brain at cellular resolution with speeds that approximate neural activity patterns and behavior, as Nature Methods methagora blog noted.
One of the results was that the scientists saw simultaneous activity patterns across large areas of the brain at the cellular level - pointing to the existence of broadly distributed functional circuits.
The next steps will be to determine the causal role that these circuits play in behavior - something that will require improvements in the methods for 3D optogenetics, the blog said. Obtaining the detailed anatomical map of these circuits will also be key to understand the brain's organization at its deepest level.
Paper:
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First Posted: Mar 19, 2013 04:10 PM EDT
A new imaging technology is so fast and has such a high resolution that it can show the activity of single neurons firing in a brain. Neuroscientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute have used this to map the activity of nearly all the neurons in a vertebrate brain at cellular resolution at once, with could have signficant implications in the near future for neuroscience research and projects like the proposed Brain Activity Map (BAM).
The technology used by the researchers is called high-speed light sheet microscopy. They successfully visualized the activity of 80% of the neurons in the brain (which is composed of ~100,000 neurons) of a fish larva at a frequency of 0.8 Hz (an image every 1.3 seconds), with single-cell resolution.
This represents the first technology that achieves whole brain imaging of a vertebrate brain at cellular resolution with speeds that approximate neural activity patterns and behavior, as Nature Methods methagora blog noted.
One of the results was that the scientists saw simultaneous activity patterns across large areas of the brain at the cellular level - pointing to the existence of broadly distributed functional circuits.
The next steps will be to determine the causal role that these circuits play in behavior - something that will require improvements in the methods for 3D optogenetics, the blog said. Obtaining the detailed anatomical map of these circuits will also be key to understand the brain's organization at its deepest level.
Paper:
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone