“So, if you really want to understand these illnesses, you want to be able to look at as many neurons as possible over different brain regions. “In brain disorders, including neurodegenerative disease, it’s not just a single neuron or a few neurons that get sick,” Ji said. For this technique they used a wide-field-of-view ‘mesoscope’ with two-photon imaging and Bessel focus scanning.Ī goal Ji has set is to gain greater understanding of how neurons interact and signal across large areas of the brain in order to locate diseased circuits linked to brain disorders. In a second paper, Ji and colleagues demonstrated an alternative technique, able to image calcium signalling over almost an entire hemisphere of the mouse brain at once. “We’ve never looked at how a disease will change with sub-threshold input. “In diseases, many things are happening, even before you can see neurons firing, like all the sub-threshold events,” said lead researcher Na Ji, a University of California (UC) Berkeley associate professor of physics and of molecular and cell biology. With this method, we can get a much more global picture of what is happening in the brain”Ī primary advantage of the new microscopy technique, say the researchers, is that they can track the hundreds to tens of thousands of inputs received by any given brain cell, including those that do not trigger the cell to continue the signal.
