Ultra Lightsheet Macro Photography for Iteratively Expanded Drosophila Connectome

Abstract:
The initiative in imaging a hugely expanded Drosophila brain via iterative expansion microscopy ExM will be discussed Through ExM 100 X expansion of Drosophila brain has been demonstrated by enlarging the typically 0 6 x 0 3 x 0 2 mm sized brain to 60 x 30 x 20 mm, promising electron microscopy like resolution 3 nm) with optical microscopy 300 nm) to resolve the synapse connection The rapid and ultra large scale imaging of large tissue samples will revolutionize our understanding of the relationship between biological function and structure Currently, commercially available imaging platforms, such as SmartSPIM can acquire images with more than 100 million pixels at a data throughput rate of several GB per second (acquisition rate 0 417 mm 3 /s with a 4 X lens) Taking the 100 X expanded Drosophila brain as an example, its volume is approximately 15 000 mm 3 and the expected 3 D scanning is estimated to be approximately 36 000 seconds 10 hours) As a comparison, the imaging speed of a spinning disk confocal microscope is only 0 0058 mm 3 /s with a 10 X lens, making it very challenging to image the whole 100 X expanded brain We estimate that our ultra Lightsheet based macro photography platform can achieve a 3 D image rate of 4 mm 3 /s with a 2 X lens, an order of magnitude faster than SmartSPIM.

Speaker:
PROF KAO FU-JEN
Institute of Biophotonics, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan