China's super microscope broadens understanding on how cells interact in mammals

BEIJING -- A team of Chinese scientists crafted a super intravital microscope that is capable of seeing clearly the entire three-dimensional interactions of a large-scale cell's network at the mammalian organ level. They captured the distinct response patterns of various cortical regions under multi-sensory stimulation and tracked large-scale neural responses with single-neuron precision across several consecutive days, according to the study. "The traditional fluorescence microscopy allowed us to observe only part of an organ, such as a specific brain region in a mouse," said Dai Qionghai, the paper's corresponding author from Tsinghua University. "The RUSH3D system, however, is akin to using 100 microscopes simultaneously, providing complete coverage of the mouse cortex and capturing the dynamic interactions of hundreds of thousands of neurons," said Dai.