Whole Brain Cellular-Level Activity Mapping in a Second
It is now possible to map the activity of nearly all the neurons in a vertebrate brain at cellular resolution. What does this mean for neuroscience research and projects like the Brain Activity Map proposal?
In an Article that just went live in Nature Methods, Misha Ahrens and Philipp Keller from HHMI’s Janelia Farm Research Campus used high-speed light sheet microscopy to image the activity of 80% of the neurons in the brain of a fish larva at speeds of a whole brain every 1.3 seconds. This represents—to our knowledge—the first technology that achieves whole brain imaging of a vertebrate brain at cellular resolution with speeds that approximate neural activity patterns and behavior.
Brain activity imaging of a whole zebrafish brain at single-cell resolution.
Interestingly, the paper comes out at a time when much is being discussed and written about mapping brain activity at the cellular level. This is one of the main proposals of the Brain Activity Map—a project that is being discussed at the White House and could be NIH’s next ‘big science’ project for the next 10-15 years. [Just for clarity, the authors of this work are not formally associated with the BAM proposal].
More: Whole Brain Cellular-Level Activity Mapping in a Second : Methagora