In the United States, scientists have developed a method to make a disembodied brain transparent, allowing them to study the organ's intricate wiring without having to slice it up.
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"Studying intact systems with this sort of molecular resolution and global scope -- to be able to see the fine detail and the big picture at the same time -- has been a major unmet goal in biology,"said Stanford University bioengineer and study leader Karl Deisseroth.
The brain is the most important organ of the body, yet how its circuitry works remains largely obscure.
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Scientists seeking access to structures deep in the brain have to make microscopic slices of the organ and then scan the images, slice by slice, before reconstituting an image on a computer.
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The gel is injected into the brain and penetrates the tissue, forming a mesh that holds the working components together.
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"What remains is a 3-D, transparent brain with all of its important structures -- neurons, axons, dendrites, synapses, proteins, nucleic acids and so forth -- intact and in place," said a statement from Stanford University which conducted the research.
Once the organ is rendered transparent, the scientists can use light and chemicals to trace individual neural connections and relationships between cell groups.
They can use fluorescent proteins to give different colours to individual nerve fibres, and use an electron microscope to study ultra-fine structures like synapses, the connections between neurons.
After their success in mice and then zebrafish, the team tested their method on post-mortem human brain sections.
In the frontal lobe of a seven-year-old autistic boy, they traced individual nerve fibres and noticed unusual "ladder-like patterns" in the neurons.
CLARITY "promises to transform the way we study the brain's anatomy and how disease changes it", commented Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health.
"No longer will the in-depth study of our most important three-dimensional organ be constrained by two-dimensional methods," he said.
Source-AFP
