🇬🇧 Revealing secrets hiding in plain sight about the ever-changing brain

Abstract

A grand challenge of modern biology is to understand mechanisms of molecular, cellular and tissue scale physiology across a daunting range of spatial and temporal scales – and how the brain restructures and reforms its structure across scales. Current imaging methods leave significant gaps in our knowledge, limiting our ability to connect information across scales. How multiple methods are now being combined to fill and help bridge critical gaps will be shared; including where recent advances to multi-tilt electron tomography (mtEMT) and development of new probes for correlated light (LM), x-ray microCT (XRM), correlated multi-ion mass spectroscopy imaging (MIMS) and EM (MIMS-EM) and state-of-the-art 3D EM technologies add to our knowledge about structure and function in complex biological systems. Examples of questions being addressed in ongoing research projects will be described to illustrate how development and application of new contrasting methods, imaging tools and data analysis strategies are allowing the observation of otherwise complex or hidden relationships between cellular, subcellular and molecular constituents of cells. For example, how advances in methods
apply to ongoing studies on the intact normal brain and to analyze brain cells and synapses during learning (or when cells and tissues respond to stressors inducing degenerative brain disorders like Alzheimer’s disease) will be shown.