Can light-sheet microscopy record a whole living brain at work? · Grey Matter

Only in animals small and transparent enough to need no clearing.

Can light-sheet microscopy record a whole living brain at work?

Only in animals small and transparent enough to need no clearing. In 2013 a light-sheet microscope recorded the brain of a larval zebrafish carrying a calcium indicator, capturing more than 80 % of its neurons at single-cell resolution, the whole volume about 0.8 times a second. At that rate it follows the slow calcium signal, too coarse to separate single spikes. A mouse or human brain scatters light too much, so in those the method works on cleared, fixed tissue, which keeps the cells and loses their activity.