High-speed microscopy reveals electrical activity across the brain

MIT engineers have developed a microscope that captures electrical activity across an entire brain at unprecedented speed. The team modified a light sheet microscope and engineered larval zebrafish to express fluorescent proteins that glow when neurons fire, allowing them to scan the entire brain two hundred times per second—fast enough to catch individual electrical impulses as they cascade through different brain regions. Previous methods were far too slow to capture rapid neural activity, or only worked on small patches of tissue. When researchers exposed the fish to ultraviolet light, they observed neural activity spreading through the optic tectum, cerebellum, and hindbrain, revealing how different brain regions coordinate at millisecond timescales. MIT professor Ed Boyden, who led the research, says this represents the first tool that can watch an entire neural network in action—a crucial step toward understanding how all the brain's neurons work together as one unified system.

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