Animal Brain Changes

 

Chinese scientists show animal brain changes while awake through neural imaging



Chinese researchers have developed a microscopy technique to take imagery of neurons in animals that are awake, a method they say allowed them to capture the rapidly changing dynamics in the neurons of mice running on wheels.

The new technique extends the capabilities of super-resolution microscopy, which has previously been limited to imaging cultured cells, tissue sections or anaesthetised animals.

“Neurons are best studied in their native states in which their functional and morphological dynamics support animals’ natural behaviours,” the team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Methods last month.

Neurons – nerve cells that send signals throughout the body which allow us to carry out functions such as eating, walking and talking – have specialised structures to support necessary functions such as communication and information integration that change over time.

The use of super-resolution microscopy to capture imagery of animals performing natural behaviour has remained a challenge because any motion can lead to imaging artefacts, or distortions in the image.

Anaesthesia, which has been used to help examine the neurons of living animals, is not ideal because it alters the physiology of neural circuits.

To overcome this, the team, led by senior investigator Wang Kai at the Centre for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, introduced a new type of super-resolution microscopy – multiplexed, line-scanning, structured illumination microscopy.

The new two-colour imaging technique is “immune to motion-induced artefacts and enables longitudinal super-resolution imaging in brains of head-fixed awake and behaving animals”.

The technique is capable of tolerating motions of up to 50 microns per second, higher than the average brain motion of a mouse running on a wheel with its head fixed in place.

“Imaging these morphological dynamics in behaving animals at higher spatiotemporal resolution can drive better understanding of the physiology of neurons and their networking,” the team wrote.

While it has been believed that sleep is involved in certain stages of memory, differences in morphological dynamics of neurons during sleep and awake states have remained unclear.

The team used their multiplexed microscopy technique to track dynamics and molecular reorganisation in mice with their head fixed in place during sleep-wake cycles, which helped reveal dynamic changes on a scale of seconds.

The technique was also used to take images of awake, running mice whose heads were fixed, and made accessible for imaging with the help of cranial glass windows.

“The combination of [the microscopy technique] and an image registration pipeline offers an opportunity to investigate the morphological dynamics of neurons at super-resolution in awake mouse brains,” the researchers said.

Compared with other techniques which require taking multiple frames from the same field of view to create one super-resolution image, the new technique is able to do so with just one scan – allowing it to better tolerate motion.

The new microscopy technique creates images at a lower resolution than the most advanced super-resolution microscopy, however it is a promising technology because of its potential application for live-brain imaging and even showing other organs and tissue, according to the researchers.


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