#imaging

Scientists See How a Memory Forms in a BrainResearchers have long know that emotionally-charged memories, particularly those that involve fear, tend to stay around longer than other recollections. A team from the University of Southern California has actually watched imaging under a microscope as a fear experience was encoded in the brain of a living fish. Zebra fish are common in such studies, because they are transparent and they can easily be genetically engineered. The scientists engineered zebra fish to have a fluorescent protein marker in their brain synapses. Then they trained them to fear light. When a fish was exposed to a light, inducing a fear response, they expected the synapses of the palladium(a brain area analogous to the amygdala in mammals) to grow. Instead, they witnessed some synapse "pruning" in the palladium, and synapse building in other parts of the palladium. In other words, they rearranged their synapses. Read a deeper dive into this research and its implications at Quanta magazine. -via Damn Interesting (Image credit: Andrey Andreev, Thai Truong, Scott Fraser; Translational Imaging Center, USC)#brain #imaging #memory #synapse #zebrafish

High Energy X-Rays Show COVID-19 Damage to the Lungs' Smallest Blood VesselsHierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT) is a new imaging technology that enables 3D mapping, which gives doctors and experts a chance to view an organ on a whole new level. The technology images an organ as a whole and manages to zoom down to cellular level. That’s some high-level imaging right there.Scientists from UCL and the European Synchrotron Research Facility (ESRF) took advantage of the technology to scan donated human organs, including lungs from a donor who got Covid-19. The HiP-CT uses X-rays with the highest energy provided by the European Synchrotron (a particle accelerator) in Grenoble, France. Their X-rays are 100 billion times brighter than a hospital X-ray. This high energy allowed the researchers to view the blood vessels in the lung to see how severe Covid-19 infection ‘shunts’ blood between the two separate systems – the capillaries which oxygenate the blood and those which feed the lung tissue itself. According to Danny Jonigk, Professor of Thoracic Pathology, (Hannover Medical School, Germany),  “by combining our molecular methods with the HiP-CT multiscale imaging in lungs affected by COVID-19 pneumonia, we gained a new understanding how shunting between blood vessels in a lung’s two vascular systems occurs in Covid-19 injured lungs, and the impact it has on oxygen levels in our circulatory system."Image credits: UCL News , Paul Tafforeau#Lungs #Organs #XRays #HiPCT #Imaging

Cryo-electron Tomography Allows Us to Look Inside CellsWhen X-ray crystallography was developed decades ago, it allowed scientists to discern proteins inside cells. But to do that, they had to isolate those proteins and turn them into crystals to see them. Then came cryo-electron microscopy, which also required separating biomolecules from their surroundings. But now we have cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET), which not only boosts the resolution of what scientists look at, but they can see proteins and biomolecules in three dimensions as they exist inside cells. Cryo-ET involves freezing and slicing a cell into unimaginably thin slices, imaging each slice with an electron microscope, and then assembling the images into a 3-dimensional visualization. Examining proteins at this level is crucial in understanding how some diseases work. Cryo-ET is already being used to study the protein action in ALS, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s disease. In the future, it can be used to study the effect of medication or other treatments in those proteins at the cellular level. Read more about this astounding imaging technique at Nature. -via Damn Interesting (Image credit: S. Albert et al./PNAS/CC BY 4.0)#imaging #cryoET #cellstructure #protein