Multimedia Gallery - An elegant, inexpensive new tool is intended to look at the junctions between neurons.

August 11, 2015

An elegant, inexpensive new tool is intended to look at the junctions between neurons.

To capture the activity between neurons as animals move about, researchers will turn an inexpensive, lightweight tube into a super-resolution fluorescence microscope. The new tool is intended to help researchers peer deep inside the brains of freely moving mice. The new technology could help explain the fundamental basis of information processing and memory. Shown here is a genetically encoded reporter system to "tag" activated synapses, the junctions between neurons.

Credit: Andrew Taibi and Jason Shepherd, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, University of Utah

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