Still Life

Artists have options – a huge palate of shades and hues to splash across a canvas. But ‘painting’ real life so it can be seen under a microscope is often limited. Using brightly coloured fluorescent stains to highlight specific biological bits is only useful if they can be separated afterwards by their unique colourful properties – their spectra. With similar colours this becomes a challenge, especially in the brain, where spectra may change in different tissues. Here researchers use a technique, called PICASSO, that allows them to use many distinct colours in a stained slice of a mouse’s brain. The secret is mutual information – how much ‘information’ from one colour bleeds into the spectrum of another. By designing software to minimise this overlap during analysis, scientists spot different blends in nearby structures – potentially expanding the palette of colours available to paint still, and not so still, microscopic life.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Video from work by Junyoung Seo, Yeonbo Sim and Jeewon Kim, and colleagues
• Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, May 2022