Efforts to spy on neural activity as animals are freely moving about have been impeded by bulky equipment or limitations in human skill sets. Microscopes are often too big to mount to the head of a rodent, and electrophysiological techniques don’t allow for simultaneous monitoring of large networks of active neurons at the resolution of a single cell.
Inscopix’s new mini fluorescence microscope, the nVista HD, smashes those barriers. “Basically, we are imaging at the cellular level the activity of thousands of neurons while an animal is able to freely navigate an established behavioral task,” says Scott Norviel, the company’s director of product marketing. The microscope sticks to a magnetic platform that frames a window in the skull. The detachable microscope weighs just 2 grams and can be plugged in during behavioral tasks or removed to share among a number of animals.
The mice don’t seem to mind the device, says Nikita Rudinskiy, a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who is using the microscope to research the neural correlates of dementia in the hippocampus. “They just do their normal stuff,” he says.
The nVista HD carries a hefty price tag of $100,000, but since its debut in October 2012, 100 units have made it to laboratories around the world. Rudinskiy says that there’s no other technology that would offer him the ability to gather data from so many neurons over such a long time frame. “With this system you can image the same mouse, the same several hundred neurons, over days and months,” he says. “It’s amazing.”
This is incredibly cool and will permit so much more understanding of neuronal function and neural circuits in the brain than one can ever get from a static section after sacrificing the mouse.
GIDDINGS: If [this innovation] delivers it will be a major disruptive event in the history of neuroscience, potentially leading to rapid advances across multiple fronts.
