Colour Mapping

Untangling an infernal cable nest growing at the bottom of your drawer would be simpler if each wire were coloured according to its location in the mess. That's the thinking behind a new low-cost microscopy method that maps the orientation of biological fibres (such as those of nerves, collagen and muscle) at the micrometre resolution (that’s about one hundredth the width of a piece of paper). By shining light at a sample and analysing how it scatters, Computational Scattered Light Imaging (ComSLI) detects and maps fibre directions even when multiple strands cross at a single point (pictured, applied to a whole brain slice and coloured according to the orientation of nerve fibres in any spot, such as red for left-to-right or light blue running up and down). It works no matter how the sample is prepared, making it a versatile tool, and has already been used to identify structural changes in conditions such as Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis.

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.

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• Image from work by Marios Georgiadis and colleagues
• Department of Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, November 2025