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Many neuroscientists who try to understand what happens to neurons in mouse brains first remove the brains from the mice. Wenbiao Gan has instead found a way to peer into live mouse brains.
Over the past ten years, Gan, program coordinator of the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at New York University, has refined a technique that directly tracks neurons in the brains of anesthetized mice.
When Gan first launched his lab, he designed and built his own two-photon microscope because commercial microscopes would burn mouse brains, he told a packed room at a workshop on Saturday at the 2011 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
In 2010, Gan used this technique to show that mice that model fragile X syndrome have more rapid turnover of dendritic spines, the signal-receiving branches of neurons, than control mice do1. This turnover could cause deficits in learning and memory, which are key features of the syndrome, Gan says.
Following the workshop, Gan told SFARI.org about his microscopy technique and how it can be used to follow neuronal development over time.
For more reports from the 2011 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, please click here.
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