Microscopes

Neuroscientific imaging demands advanced techniques capable of resolving intricate neural circuits, fine axonal structures, and precise synaptic connections within expansive, three-dimensional volumes. Light-sheet fluorescence microscopy has emerged as a transformative tool for this purpose, enabling high-speed, three-dimensional imaging with minimal photodamage.

BrainJ enables high-throughput analysis of serial tissue sections imaged using confocal or widefield techniques. Developed in Fiji, our approach leverages freely available tools for machine learning pixel classification for cell detection and mesoscale mapping of axons and dendrites.

MINI2P is an open-source miniature 2-photon microscope brain explorer for fast high-resolution calcium imaging in freely-moving mice. In brief Development of a miniature 2-photon miniscope for large-scale calcium imaging in freely moving mice allows stable simultaneous recording of more than a thousand cells across multiple planes of densely active cortical regions in a wide spectrum of behavioral tasks without impediment of the animal’s behavior.

Advances in fluorescence microscopy enable monitoring larger brain areas in-vivo with finer time resolution. The resulting data rates require reproducible analysis pipelines that are reliable, fully automated, and scalable to datasets generated over the course of months.

Nervous system development and plasticity involves changes in cellular morphology, making morphological analysis a valuable exercise in the study of nervous system development, function and disease. Morphological analysis is a time-consuming exercise requiring meticulous manual tracing of cellular contours and extensions.

PUMA is 3D printed open source portable modular microscope with augmented reality, fluorescence, phase contrast, epi-illumination, epi- and trans-polarisation and other features. You can either build it fully DIY or purchase the basic scope ready made and upgrade it as required (see below for details).

One of the biggest challenges in neuroscience is to understand how neural circuits in the brain process, encode, store, and retrieve information. Meeting this challenge requires tools capable of recording and manipulating the activity of intact neural networks in freely behaving animals.

Designed for ease of use, robustness and low-cost, the “Openspritzer” is an open hardware “Picospritzer” as routinely used in biological labs around the world. The performance of Openspritzer and commercial alternatives is effectively indistinguishable.

Ultra-low-cost, easily implemented and flexible two-photon scanning microscopy modification offering a several-fold expanded three-dimensional field of view that also maintains single-cell resolution. Application of our system for imaging neuronal activity has been demonstrated on mice, zebrafish and fruit flies

World Wide Series Seminar AAV are versatile tools used by neuroscientists for expression and manipulation of neurons. Many scientists have benefited from the high-quality, ready-to-use AAV prep service from Addgene, a nonprofit plasmid repository.