Protein imaging reveals detailed brain architecture
MIT chemical engineers and neuroscientists have developed a new way to classify neurons by labeling and imaging the proteins found in each cell. This type of imaging offers clues to each neuron’s function and should help in mapping the human brain, the researchers say. “Each cell uses a unique combination of proteins. It’s basically a fingerprint,” says Kwanghun Chung, who is the Samuel A. Goldblith Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and the leader of the research team. “If you can look at expression patterns of many proteins, then you can guess each cell’s type and what it’s doing.” Using this approach, the researchers were able to visualize 22 different proteins inside human brain slices, but the method could be scaled to analyze many more proteins and larger tissue samples. This could...