Activities
Winfried Denk
Watching the Brain Compute, and Tracing Its Wires: New Methods to Solve Old
Riddles
Volume imaging methods are crucial to the understanding of organ function.
No organ is more interconnected in 3 dimensions with a cell typically having thousands of neighbors than the brain . At one extreme are imaging methods that allow us
to map activity in the intact - preferably awake - brain. Among those, the
only method with sub-cellular 3D resolution is multi-photon microscopy,
which we have extended to imaging depth of close to 1000 micron and to
operation on behaving animals. At the other extreme, are methods mostly
based on electron microscopy that provide images at deep sub-micron
resolution. We have recently developed serial block-face scanning electron
microscopy (SBFSEM), which allows the acquisition of intrinsically aligned
volume data at a resolution sufficient to trace the thinnest neural processes,
with the goal to completely reconstruct neural circuits.