New 3-D Microscope Watches Neurons Fire, Muscles Contract

A new high-speed microscope is giving researchers a clear view of the moving insides of living organisms in 3-D.

The technique, developed by Columbia University engineers, doesn’t need samples to be mounted so living subjects can move around freely while being scanned. With its rapid image acquisition, it can capture cellular structure along with function and behavior, says developer Elizabeth Hillman, an associate professor of biomedical engineering. She call the new approach swept confocally aligned planar excitation (SCAPE) microscopy.

“The ability to perform real-time 3-D imaging at cellular resolution in behaving organisms is a new frontier for biomedical and neuroscience research,” she says. “With SCAPE, we can now image complex, living things, such as neurons firing in the rodent brain, crawling fruit fly larvae, and single cells in the zebrafish heart while the heart is actually beating spontaneously—this has not been possible until now.”

The new technology, she says, has overcome major hurdles faced by similar microscopes by using an approach that renders images up to 100 times faster. It uses a simpler setup that is relatively inexpensive compared to others.

SCAPE still has a ways to go to compete with other systems that can penetrate specimens more deeply. Still, Hillman says, her team has already been able to capture neuronal firing in a mouse’s brain and the instrument can peer all the way through smaller organisms like zebrafish and fly larvae.

Hillman says SCAPE should also become useful in studying replication and function in other types of tissue besides nervous and cardiac varieties. A study on their work was published last month in the journal Nature Photonics.

All gifs created from video courtesy of Hillman Lab/Columbia.