Whole-brain imaging reaches new heights (and lengths)

Abstract

Advances in microscopy and sample preparation have led to the first ever mapping of individual neurons in the whole mouse brain.

Keywords: Axonal reconstruction; Neuroanatomy; Neuroimaging; Neuroinformatics; Tissue clearing; Whole-brain imaging; mouse; neuroscience.

Figure 1.. Imaging neurons in the brain.

(a) Electron microscopy can be used to map the neurons in a small volume of brain tissue (typically about 0.015 mm³; top) by recording images of thousands of very thin slices and combining them. This approach can provide a high-resolution connectome of a small volume of tissue (bottom). (b) Fluorescence microscopy can be used to map the connections between the different regions of a brain by recording images of about 150–300 slices separated by about 0.05–0.1 mm (top) and combining them. The resulting projectome can reveal, for example, that region A is connected to region B, but not to region C (bottom). (c) Economo et al. used a combination of tissue clearing, serial sectioning and sparse labeling (by injecting adenovirus at x; top) to track the projections from 10–50 neurons throughout the brain (bottom). This approach allowed projections with diameters that measured as little as 100 nm to be mapped. This technique provides single-neuron mapping throughout the whole brain. Illustrations are not to scale.