The brain's ability to learn comes from"plasticity," in which neurons constantly edit and remodel the tiny connections called synapses that they make with other neurons to form circuits. To study plasticity, neuroscientists seek to track it at high resolution across whole cells, but plasticity doesn't wait for slow microscopes to keep pace and brain tissue is notorious for scattering light and making images fuzzy.
Scanning a whole line of a sample is inherently faster than just scanning one point at a time, but it kicks up a lot of scattering. To manage that scattering, some scope systems just discard scattered photons as noise, but then they are lost, said lead author Yi Xue, an assistant professor at UC Davis and a former graduate student in the lab of corresponding author Peter T.C. So, professor of mechanical engineering and biological engineering at MIT.
For a more definitive proof, Xue worked with Josiah Boivin in the Nedivi lab to image neurons in the brain of a live, anesthetized mouse, using mosTF. Even in this much more complex environment, where the pulsations of blood vessels and the movement of breathing provide additional confounds, the mosTF scope still achieved a four-fold better signal-to-background ratio.
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