Courtesy of Watt Webb
Developed just over a decade ago, multiphoton microscopy (MPM) has taken neuroscientists to places that Leeuwenhoek probably couldn't fathom. It's taken them further even than confocal microscopy has – further into the light-scattering depths of the brain, that is. By relying on more targeted and less damaging light than its confocal predecessor, MPM gives neuroscientists the ability to noninvasively image hundreds of microns below the surface. Even in thickly myelinated tissue, where confocal imaging is all but impossible, targeted fluorophores readily absorb and emit MPM laser-fired photons, producing a crisp three-dimensional digital image that can be observed and analyzed on a computer screen.1
"If you want to look at scattering tissue," says Cornell University's Joe Fetcho, "it's the only game in town." Few disagree. And Fetcho doesn't even use MPM in his research on neuronal activity in zebrafish, because the fish are practically translucent and don't ...
