Courtesy of Rachel Joynes
Dorsoventral view of a thin section through the larval central nervous system of the fruit fly, stained in red for serotonin, and in green for dopaminergic and sertonergic neurons. The cell bodies are at the lower ventral part of the photos, and above the cell bodies is an extensive array of synaptic varicosities.
To the uninitiated, three-dimensional microscopy makes the pretty pictures of fluorescently labeled cells that grace the covers of scientific journals. But to today's microscopists, the capacity to render images from 3-D and 4-D datasets is critical for studying the distances between objects in a sample and for tracking how complex samples change over time. "It's hard to look at 2-D slices one at a time and then put that together in your mind in order to see the relationships among objects," says Dean Sequera, vice president of product development for Media Cybernetics, a ...
