Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Miniaturized integration of a fluorescence microscope

Hey, only 2 grams in weight and able to be used in living mice. With the ability to track 200 neurons I would think it should be able to track neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. Lets start human trials.
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmeth.1694.html
The light microscope is traditionally an instrument of substantial size and expense. Its miniaturized integration would enable many new applications based on mass-producible, tiny microscopes. Key prospective usages include brain imaging in behaving animals for relating cellular dynamics to animal behavior. Here we introduce a miniature (1.9 g) integrated fluorescence microscope made from mass-producible parts, including a semiconductor light source and sensor. This device enables high-speed cellular imaging across ~0.5 mm2 areas in active mice. This capability allowed concurrent tracking of Ca2+ spiking in >200 Purkinje neurons across nine cerebellar microzones. During mouse locomotion, individual microzones exhibited large-scale, synchronized Ca2+ spiking. This is a mesoscopic neural dynamic missed by prior techniques for studying the brain at other length scales. Overall, the integrated microscope is a potentially transformative technology that permits distribution to many animals and enables diverse usages, such as portable diagnostics or microscope arrays for large-scale screens.

Every researcher needs one, ask yours if you can see a demonstration.

No comments:

Post a Comment