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Scientists Build Microscope Onto The Head Of A Rat

Posted by timothy on from the ran-out-of-other-things-to-do dept.

mindpixel writes: "Unisci is reporting: 'The ability to see individual neurons in detail in the brains of conscious, behaving animals seems like the stuff of science fiction. But in the current issue of Neuron, Professor Winfried Denk and colleagues report that they have done just that. In a stunning technical achievement, they have built a tiny, powerful microscope onto the head of a rat.'" This might be technically stunning, but I wonder how much the rat likes it.

1 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Why MRI won't help much for this. by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why cant they just use Magnetic Resonance Imaging instead, then they doesnt even have to put stuff in the poor little rats head. Using nuclear magnetic resonance seems to me to be the only way to se things in 3D because you can scan out "slices" and put them together and so to speak get a 3D-picture of the stuff in the brain.

    Actually, PET (Positron Emission Tomography) and CAT (Computed Axial Tomography [via x-ray absorption scanning]) and even old-fashioned ultrasound give you 3D pictures too.

    None of these are anywhere close to the resolution you'd get looking through a microscope. Great for finding tumours or looking at large-scale brain activity, and useless for looking at function on the level of individual neurons.

    Even if you're looking only at surface neurons, watching neurons while they're operating in a brain will teach you one heck of a lot (especially if you hook a spectrophotometer up to the microscope and get chemical composition readouts - neurochemistry is only partly understood).