A fast imaging technique can monitor the activity of individual neurons across the brain of fish larvae, providing both a detailed and comprehensive view of a vertebrate brain.
Misha Ahrens and Philipp Keller at Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, imaged the brains of transparent larval zebrafish (Danio rerio), which had been engineered to have neurons that fluoresce when active. The authors improved on a technique that uses planes of laser light to capture images layer by layer, called light-sheet microscopy, by increasing the imaging speed. The method could cover the full brain of a 5-day-old zebrafish larva every 1.3 seconds, detecting more than 80% of its 100,000-odd neurons at the single-cell level (pictured).
Such images can help researchers to map activity across the brain and show which parts of the brain function together, the researchers say.
Nature Meth. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2434 (2013)
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Single cells seen in whole brains. Nature 495, 413 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/495413a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/495413a
