"Your peripheral nervous system (PNS) is crucial to navigating daily life. It lets you walk, controls your eye movements, and rings your brain's alarms when you step on a Lego brick. Yet researchers have never built a complete map of this essential network in any mammalian body. Now a study published in Cell shows a complete, three-dimensional map of every single nerve fiber threading through a mouse."
"Mapping of the PNS has been a neglected component of mapping the connectome in animal and human brain studies, says John Darrell Van Horn, a brain and data science researcher at the University of Virginia, who was not involved in the study. The research team began by making the bodies of 16 mice as visually transparent as possible, removing fat, calcium, and other materials that block light."
The peripheral nervous system enables movement, eye control, and rapid sensory alarms. A complete three-dimensional map of every peripheral nerve fiber in a mouse was created, representing the first full mammalian connectome that includes the PNS beyond brain and spinal cord. The team cleared 16 mouse bodies of fat, calcium, and other light-blocking materials to make tissues visually transparent. They imaged each body with a custom combined slicing tool and microscope at 400-micron intervals, taking about 40 hours per mouse. Seven mice had fluorescent neurons, and four underwent immunostaining to label sympathetic nervous system proteins.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]