davi

In the fruit fly, neuronal cell types are highly morphologically stereotyped and identifiable across animals. This means that for a given cell type, you can collect data on electrical synapses in animal A, on transmitters in animal B, and on electrophysiology in animal C, and in this fashion assemble a unified, multimodal view of the parts involved. Our whole brain EM volume lets you see how those parts are connected.

In the above examples dead brains are okay except for electrophysiology, where the brain needs to be alive.

Hey cool, 3rd author Shane Gonin is now at Janelia (where my lab is) and I know a bit about this work. Funny to see it pop up here.

The kind of electron microscopy (EM) of brain tissue I do relies upon embedding the tissue in a resin called Epon. Epon has excellent cutting properties and low intrinsic contrast in EM. But in order to embed tissue in Epon it has to be completely dehydrated, which quenches genetically expressed fluorphores like GFP.

My fantasy for these genetically expressed buckyball-like proteins is that one could engineer their interior to be sufficiently hydrophilic that GFP fluorescence would survive complete dehydration of the surrounding tissue, instead relying on the polarized residues of the amino acids in the interior. This would let us combine highest quality EM with highest quality light microscopy in the same sample -- which would be very useful indeed.