Breaking Down Brains

The relationships between the different cellular objects which make up neural tissue in a human brain are largely unknown. To address this researchers have started to use electron microscopy as a technique to study neural tissue at nanometre resolution, managing to reconstruct a complete, but small, portion of a mouse neocortex – the part of a mammalian brain concerned with sensory information and conscious thought. Thousands of brain slices, each around 1 mm², were studied and used to reconstruct a volume of brain tissue (as shown), which can be expanded to show all the cellular and sub-cellular components, such as axons and glia. More studies like this will be used to create an online database of information, providing insight into how the neural network is related to the physical properties of brain tissue, identifying any patterns which may correlate to psychological or development disorders.

Written by Helen Thomas

Helen Thomas

Writer

Currently at Warwick University, Helen is working towards a chemistry doctorate in nanomaterials. However her scientific interests remain broad, and she enjoys exploring these different areas as a writer for the University paper.

• Movie from work by Narayanan Kasthuri and colleagues
• Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
• Copyright Elsevier 2015
• Published in Cell, July 2015