In 1906 at the University of Munich the neuropathologist Dr. Alois Alzheimer [Figure 1] was studying the brain of a recently deceased patient, Auguste Deter. Previously Alzheimer had assisted Frau Deter in the city asylum in Frankfurt and observed that she suffered from memory loss...
Acetylcholine neurotransmission in the brain via the central cholinergic system has been implicated in critical functions including cognition, arousal, attention and learning. Moreover, interest in central cholinergic transmission has been piqued given that loss of cholinergic innervation may play an important role in neurodegenerative disorders...
There is a growing trend among biomedical researchers to interrogate biological structures and biomolecular information in three-dimensional volumes rather than in thin slices. This is particularly the case for neuroscientists looking to spatially map the interactions between the hundreds of unique cell types in the...
Neurons communicate not only via conventional neurotransmitters but also through neuropeptides. Whereas neurotransmitters often operate by changing the excitability of neighboring neurons, neuropeptides typically impact molecular pathways within target cells leading to diverse modulatory effects. Individual neurons can release both a conventional neurotransmitter and one...
Prof. Li-Huei Tsai’s lab at MIT is focused on uncovering the cellular and circuit-level mechanisms that underlie Alzheimer’s disease, the devastating neurological disorder that degrades the brain’s learning and memory systems. In a 2016 paper in Nature (Iaccarino et al.), the lab reported the surprising...
New to tissue clearing? If so, you are in the right place! This guide will walk you through the tissue processing journey step by step. First, to ensure the sample retains endogenous fluorescence, protein antigenicity, and structural integrity throughout the clearing process, the tissue ...
Breathtaking progress in life sciences has brought us innovations such as high-throughput and individually-affordable genomic sequencing as well as next-generation flow cytometry that can phenotype dissociated cells for their expression of dozens of markers simultaneously. The development of cutting-edge technology solutions with standardized workflows has...
Histological analysis has classically been performed on thin tissue sections so that fine-scale features such as individual neuronal cell bodies and cellular processes can be resolved using light microscopy. This tissue-thickness limitation is due to two primary mechanisms: (#1) contamination of the focal plane by...