Austria-based researchers have unveiled high speed imaging that can capture 70% of the neurons in the brain of a Caenorhabditis elegans worm simultaneously and with single neuron resolution. The two-photon excitation technique, based on a light sculpting microscope, opens new possibilities for studying the organism's nervous system and pairing brain function to brain anatomy. To date, researchers have focused on imaging single neurons and small networks within the worm but have struggled to track all neurons with a brain, trading off spatial or temporal accuracy with the size of the brain region under study. To bypass these limitations, Robert Prevedal and colleagues from the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna, developed a wide-field two-photon light-sculpting method for volumetric fluorescent imaging, to optimise the distribution of light within a sample and boost resolution.
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