Lattice light-sheet microscopy, a new method of imaging the brain with unprecedented resolution and speed, has been developed by researchers. They can use this method to locate individual neurons, trace connections between them, and visualize organelles inside neurons across large areas of brain tissue.
The new technology combines a technique for expanding brain tissue, allowing for higher resolution imaging, with a rapid 3-D microscopy technique known as lattice light-sheet microscopy. The researchers demonstrated that they could image the entire fruit fly brain and large mouse brain sections much faster than possible.
The microscopy technique enables researchers to map large-scale circuits within the brain while providing a unique insight into the functions of individual neurons.
They can now image at a large scale using the light-sheet microscopy technique in conjunction with the expansion microscopy process without losing sight of the nanoscale configuration of biomolecules.
They combined expansion microscopy with lattice light-sheet microscopy in the new study. This technology has several key characteristics that make it ideal for expansion microscopy: It can rapidly image large samples and causes far less photodamage than other fluorescent microscopy techniques. The lattice light-sheet microscope and expansion microscopy are required to achieve the imaging’s sensitivity, resolution, and scalability.