Seiriki, K. et al. Neuron 94, 1085–1100 (2017).

Several approaches for imaging of fluorescently labeled whole brains are available, but they suffer from either slow speed or low resolution. Seiriki et al. have sped up the process of imaging in their block-FAce Serial microscopy Tomography (FAST) approach. They combine a spinning-disk-based confocal microscope with a tissue microslicer. With their setup, they acquire tiled image stacks, shave off the imaged brain slice, and then repeat the imaging and slicing until the whole brain is imaged. The approach is fast enough to image whole mouse brains at subcellular resolution in less than three hours. Furthermore, it is possible to collect the brain slices in order to conduct post hoc immunohistological analyses. The researchers have also scaled up the approach to marmoset and human post-mortem brains.