[MOS] 2/27 - Modern Optics and Spectroscopy Seminar with Elizabeth M.C. Hillman (Columbia University)

[Christine Brooks]

There will be a Modern Optics and Spectroscopy Seminar held next Tuesday, February 27 at 12pm in 34-401

Elizabeth M.C. Hillman
Columbia University

“High-speed imaging of whole-brain activity”

 The past decade has seen dramatic improvements in in-vivo optical reporters and modulators of neural activity. Yet imaging challenges still limit our ability to capture the activity of thousands of neurons, across large brain regions in awake behaving organisms. Our lab has contributed several imaging techniques to this field, including swept confocally aligned planar excitation (SCAPE) microscopy for highspeed 3D microscopy. SCAPE is a form of light sheet microscopy, but uses only a single, stationary objective lens at the sample and captures volumes by laterally scanning an oblique light sheet. SCAPE’s features combine to make it very fast (up to 100 volumes per second) in addition to providing high signal to noise with low photobleaching and a sample geometry that can accommodate a wide range of intact, living and unmounted specimens. We are applying SCAPE to imaging awake, behaving organisms such as the freely crawling Drosophila larva, the whole brain of behaving adult Drosophila, zebrafish brain and heart, C. Elegans worms, mouse olfactory epithelium and the awake mouse cortex. We have also developed numerous technological extensions of the SCAPE technique including systems with much higher resolution, with larger ‘meso’ fields of view, two-photon implementations and systems optimized for highspeed imaging of cleared tissues and for histopathology. We have also developed wide-field optical mapping (WFOM) for high-speed imaging of both neural activity and brain hemodynamics over the entire dorsal cortical surface in awake, behaving mice. This technique provides very high throughput observations of real-time, bilateral brain activity, providing a way to analyze the interplay between spontaneous behavior and brain-wide neural representations. This platform also enables detailed, longitudinal analysis of changes in neurovascular coupling, brain function and state induced by behavior, drugs and diseases. Both of these techniques are providing new high-speed, real time views of brain-wide activity in awake, behaving animals, providing unique new views of the working brain. I will present our latest progress on high-speed imaging technique development, and showcase our work applying these techniques to understand whole-brain activity in the context of awake behavior.


Refreshments will be served immediately following the seminar


Christine Brooks
Administrative Assistant
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Chemistry
77 Massachusetts Ave, 6-333
Cambridge, MA 02139
p: 617.253.7239
e: cbrooks at mit.edu<mailto:cbrooks at mit.edu>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/mos/attachments/20180221/2d3fc498/attachment.html