Research in the News: In the mind of a mouse: A Jackson Pollock?

A new microscopy imaging method developed at Yale captures images of axons, the connections between brain cells, in a living mouse.

The horizontal blue lines are axons coated with myelin, a fatty reflective layer, captured without use of fluorescent labels. Instead, researchers used the light of lasers that reflect like in a mirror on the surface of the myelin. The red tubes are blood vessels captured with existing fluorescence imaging technology and, simultaneously, with the new method called spectral confocal reflectance microscopy (SCoRe), a breakthrough for researchers seeking to visualize individual projections of brain cells.

For information on this work, read the article in Nature Medicine.