Future House in collaboration with E11 Bio announced a new way to map brain circuits at scale.
The key ingredients are simple (but putting them together has been hard):
1. Electron microscopy, which is standard for connectomics today, is too slow.
2. Standard optical microscopes don't have enough resolution to map brain circuits.
3. Researchers use pan-stains to label membranes and synaptic stains to label synapses.
4. Finally, and crucially: mapping neurons with nanometer resolution across centimeters of axon length, without many any errors, is supremely difficult. Researchers use optical protein barcodes, like brainbow, and multiplexed antibody staining to get the neurons to trace themselves.
The key ingredients are simple (but putting them together has been hard):
1. Electron microscopy, which is standard for connectomics today, is too slow.
2. Standard optical microscopes don't have enough resolution to map brain circuits.
3. Researchers use pan-stains to label membranes and synaptic stains to label synapses.
4. Finally, and crucially: mapping neurons with nanometer resolution across centimeters of axon length, without many any errors, is supremely difficult. Researchers use optical protein barcodes, like brainbow, and multiplexed antibody staining to get the neurons to trace themselves.