Colours light up brain structure
All the colours of the rainbow
"It's not often that research results look this good. An elegant new way to visualize individual brain cells not only provides a major boost to scientists trying to understand how the brain works, but has also won one of its developers a major prize in science photography.
The method — described by neuroscientists at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in today’s Nature 1 — allows researchers to see more clearly how individual neurons connect with each other by colouring each one from a palette of about 90 shades. In this way they will be able to build up a detailed diagram of the brain's wiring, which will help to study how it computes.
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Jeff Lichtman, Sanes and colleagues found a way for transgenic mice to express various mixtures of four colours of fluorescent proteins in their neurons: yellow, red, cyan, and either orange or green.
They did this by introducing a string of four colour-producing genes, controlled by a genetic system called Cre/ lox. They organized the elements of this system such that it would randomly promote the activity of just one of the colour-producing genes in vivo. Then they introduced multiple copies of the gene string into the genome of mouse embryonic stem cells, from which they developed transgenic mice.
Each neuron of the transgenic mice switched on a random number of these colour genes. The result was some 90 shades that could be seen by a researcher looking at the cells.
One neuron, for example, might switch on just red and cyan, so it would glow a pleasant mauve; a neighbour might switch on a lot of red and a bit of green and blue glow a shocking pink. They call their system the Brainbow.
This colour mixing is similar to that used by television sets, says Sanes, which produce only red, green or blue pixels but mix them to make any colour needed."
by Alison Abbott (Nature)
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