Sun, W. et al. Nat. Neurosci. 19, 308–315 (2016).

Imaging fine details in deep regions of the mouse brain is challenging because of light scatter due to the differences in refractive indices within brain tissue and between the tissue and its environment. Sun et al. use adaptive optics to adjust for aberrations when imaging the activity of neurons in the mouse visual system. Although commonly used for correcting atmospheric aberrations in astronomy, adaptive optics technologies are slowly finding their way into basic biological research. Sun et al. show that this approach improves optical access to synapses or cell bodies of neurons in deep layers of the visual cortex and allows characterization of the orientation selectivity of these neurons in response to directional stimuli.