Zeguan Wang

Watching Electricity Race Through a Living Brain Imagine trying to listen to every conversation in a crowded stadium at once—and catching not just the cheers, but the exact instant each person starts speaking. That is roughly the challenge neuroscientists face when they want to understand how brains work as whole systems. Calcium imaging has long let researchers watch activity ripple across tiny vertebrate brains, yet calcium is a slow proxy.

Abstract Neurons interact in networks distributed throughout the brain. While much effort has focused on whole-brain calcium imaging, advances in genetically encoded voltage indicators raise the question of whether it might be possible to image neuronal voltage across entire brains. Achieving this requires a microscope with high volumetric imaging rates and signal-to-noise ratio.

1Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA 2Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA 3Department of Neurosurgery, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA 4Department of Molecular & Cellular Physiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA 5Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA 6Department of Physics, University of...