Watching the brain and tracing its wires
No organ is more interconnected than the brain: most neurons have thousands of neighbours. Live imaging methods allow us to map activity in the intact awake brain. Multi-photon microscopy now reaches depths of 1 mm and more and works on behaving animals. Volume electron microscopy methods, such as serial block-face electron microscopy (SBEM), provide 3D data with large fields-of-view at deep sub-micron resolution, sufficient to trace the thinnest neural processes with the promise to completely reconstruct neural circuits.
Keywords
Two-photon microscope / serial block-face electron microscope / connectomics / neural microcircuits