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Acquire more powerful insights to progress your research
Resolve optical properties at the nanoscale
Understanding the wiring of the brain requires visualizing its constituent cells with electron microscopy, the only technique that can visualize the nanoscale details that define individual cells. With high-throughput electron microscopy, these details can be collected on a large scale, providing data for a full map of all interactions in the brain, helping you examine processes like behavior, memory, and decision making.
One of the most fascinating challenges in neuroscience is the mapping of the complete connectivity of the brain. Recent years have seen a rapid expansion in the field of connectomics, the study of tracing and understanding this connectivity map. One of the methods of choice in the field of connectomics is 3D electron microscopy (3D EM). 3D EM enables imaging of large volumes of brain tissue at nanoscale resolution, to study the structures that define individual brain cells and interactions with other cells, even at long distances.
Electron imaging of all the sections is probably the most limiting factor in connectomics, as the throughput of an EM defines the size of the project. The time needed to record massive datasets in volume EM can go up to weeks, months or even years. To tackle this bottleneck we developed FAST-EM, an ultra-fast multibeam electron microscope, which accelerates the data collection steps required for connectomics. FAST-EM system combines high spatial resolution with high speed and automation and it speeds up existing projects and enables projects previously unfeasible with conventional scanning EMs.
FAST-EM significantly decreases the time needed to acquire large 3D images. This opens the way to larger projects, such as imaging entire brains for connectomics studies in reasonable amounts of time. At the same time, high-throughput imaging enables comparative studies, which were previously too time-consuming to be feasible.
Dr. Jacob Hoogenboom
-Faculty of Applied Sciences, TU Delft
