With a resolution of 1 micron or one thousandth of a millimeter, a team of scientists from the China University of Science and Technology has succeeded in obtaining a high-resolution 3D complete brain image of a monkey brain, which is among the closest to the human brain in terms of structural complexity and cognitive function.
It is the world’s first high-resolution 3D image of a monkey brain, a breakthrough that could pave the way for treatments for diseases in humans, including Parkinson’s.
The team used a new technique – Volumetric Imaging with Synchronized Scan and Read-on-the-Fly, or VISoR – to show how nerve cells are organized and connected within the monkey brain at “micron resolution.” Until now, the brain of a mouse was the largest to be mapped, taking days to create a complete 3D image, but the new technique made it possible to move on to a brain of a macaque, which is about 200 times larger in volume than that of a mouse in just four days.
The VISoR application can be extended to imaging other tissues and organs, including clinical pathology specimens.
The images resulting from this mapping occupy more than one petabyte of data : 1000 terabytes.
“This work demonstrates a powerful method that allows researchers to dissect the monkeys’ mesoscopic connectome with a resolution of one micron, in four days. Hopefully, this technology will be further improved for broader and larger-scale applications , to make important contributions to the mapping and understanding of primates and, ultimately, the human brain “, explains Duan Shumin, leader of the work that publishes the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Referencia: High-throughput mapping of a whole rhesus monkey brain at micrometer resolution . Nature Biotechnology 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-00986-5
