Quick Look

Hurtling through cells like a spaceship zooming past the stars, this video takes you on a journey through a mouse’s brain. Interactive explorations like this provide valuable information about how various diseases take hold in the brain, but have always taken weeks to produce. A new technique, however, produced this visualisation in just a few hours. The aptly-named ‘FAST’ (block-face serial microscopy tomography) method automatically slices the brain into micro-layers, then processes the segments, producing images so detailed that individual cells, and their contents, can be seen. Dramatically reducing the time taken to process samples means multiple brains can be compared together, allowing a new avenue of investigation for researchers. The technique has already been scaled up and tested on human samples, raising hopes that it’ll soon be used to identify precise physical abnormalities in diseased brains, and ultimately lead to new treatments.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

Website

• Image/video from work by Kaoru Seiriki and Atsushi Kasai, and colleagues
• Laboratory of Molecular Neuropharmacology, Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan
• Image/video copyright Elsevier 2017
• Published in Neuron, June 2017