Light field microscopy for whole brain activity maps
(Phys.org) —Advances in light-sheet microscopy have led to impressive images and videos of the brain in action. With this technique, a plane of light is scanned through the sample to excite fluorescent calcium sensors which proxy neural activity. While the transparent head of a baby zebrafish, or even the whole body of a tiny worm can now be mapped with impressive lateral resolution, the temporal resolution is still limited by the need for the scanning. A potentially much more powerful technique—light field microscopy (LFM)—gets rid of the moving parts and can therefore create volumetric images in a fraction of the time. Ed Boyden and his collaborators have now tuned these methods to create the first "functional LFM images" of the brain. Their results have just been published to the Arxiv preprint server.