Using electron microscopy to look at thousands of ultrathin
brain slices taken from awake and sleeping mice, they found that after sleep, the size of most synapses — specifically, the surface area where two neurons touch each other — shrank by about 18 percent.
The Soak The first step in preparing for the whole -
brain slicing takes months: The organ soaks in formaldehyde until it becomes rubbery.
Not exact matches
He then
took slices of each mouse's
brain and measured whether it led to an increase in the amount of electricity passing between neurons in the accumbens and the prefrontal cortex.
Hu's team then
took brain slices from the mice in order to measure the electrical currents produced from mPFC neurons.
A CT scan uses X-rays to
take pictures of the
brain in
slices.
To make such a detailed model, researchers
took specks of
brain tissue and cut them into
slices thousands of times thinner than a human hair.
This
brain slice from a human autopsy has
taken on vivid color in the hands of a neuroscientist: green from infection by a lentivirus, red for neurons, blue for the nuclei of
brain cells.
«We can
take a 1 - mm whole
brain slice and zoom in on it,» Ellisman said, «and keep zooming up to the diffraction limit, to the intranuclei, to the neurons in the cerebellum.»