Clear As Day

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject… And so this knowledge will be unfolded through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them… Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has something for every age to investigate… Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.

Seneca

(via scienceisbeauty)

Meet the all-female team of coders that brought us Apollo 11.

In 1969, the world watched as Neil Armstrong marked his historic achievement with the words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” His now-famous transmission was heard around the globe thanks to NASA’s Deep Space Network, which made communication from outer space possible.

That network was built by a woman named Susan Finley. She was part of an all-female team of coders whose work was integral to the success of the Apollo 11 mission. Science writer Nathalia Holt brings us their stories in her book, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us from Missiles to the Moon to Mars.

Listen to their story here.

[Images via NASA]

a mushroom rainbow to put the fun in fungi. cause they don’t need psilocybin to be magic. and though some mushrooms are coloured as a toxicity warning to predators, many others are brightly coloured to instead attract potential spore dispersers. see this for more on the bioluminescent mushrooms seen here. (photos)

(Image caption: A new technique called magnified analysis of proteome (MAP), developed at MIT, allows researchers to peer at molecules within cells or take a wider view of the long-range connections between neurons. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers)

Imaging the brain at multiple size scales

MIT researchers have developed a new technique for imaging brain tissue at multiple scales, allowing them to peer at molecules within cells or take a wider view of the long-range connections between neurons.

This technique, known as magnified analysis of proteome (MAP), should help scientists in their ongoing efforts to chart the connectivity and functions of neurons in the human brain, says Kwanghun Chung, the Samuel A. Goldblith Assistant Professor in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

“We use a chemical process to make the whole brain size-adjustable, while preserving pretty much everything. We preserve the proteome (the collection of proteins found in a biological sample), we preserve nanoscopic details, and we also preserve brain-wide connectivity,” says Chung, the senior author of a paper describing the method in the July 25 issue of Nature Biotechnology.

The researchers also showed that the technique is applicable to other organs such as the heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys.

The paper’s lead authors are postdoc Taeyun Ku, graduate student Justin Swaney, and visiting scholar Jeong-Yoon Park.

Multiscale imaging

The new MAP technique builds on a tissue transformation method known as CLARITY, which Chung developed as a postdoc at Stanford University. CLARITY preserves cells and molecules in brain tissue and makes them transparent so the molecules inside the cell can be imaged in 3-D. In the new study, Chung sought a way to image the brain at multiple scales, within the same tissue sample.

“There is no effective technology that allows you to obtain this multilevel detail, from brain region connectivity all the way down to subcellular details, plus molecular information,” he says.

To achieve that, the researchers developed a method to reversibly expand tissue samples in a way that preserves nearly all of the proteins within the cells. Those proteins can then be labeled with fluorescent molecules and imaged.

The technique relies on flooding the brain tissue with acrylamide polymers, which can form a dense gel. In this case, the gel is 10 times denser than the one used for the CLARITY technique, which gives the sample much more stability. This stability allows the researchers to denature and dissociate the proteins inside the cells without destroying the structural integrity of the tissue sample.

Before denaturing the proteins, the researchers attach them to the gel using formaldehyde, as Chung did in the CLARITY method. Once the proteins are attached and denatured, the gel expands the tissue sample to four or five times its original size.

“It is reversible and you can do it many times,” Chung says. “You can then use off-the-shelf molecular markers like antibodies to label and visualize the distribution of all these preserved biomolecules.”

There are hundreds of thousands of commercially available antibodies that can be used to fluorescently tag specific proteins. In this study, the researchers imaged neuronal structures such as axons and synapses by labeling proteins found in those structures, and they also labeled proteins that allow them to distinguish neurons from glial cells.

“We can use these antibodies to visualize any target structures or molecules,” Chung says. “We can visualize different neuron types and their projections to see their connectivity. We can also visualize signaling molecules or functionally important proteins.”

High resolution

Once the tissue is expanded, the researchers can use any of several common microscopes to obtain images with a resolution as high as 60 nanometers — much better than the usual 200 to 250-nanometer limit of light microscopes, which are constrained by the wavelength of visible light. The researchers also demonstrated that this approach works with relatively large tissue samples, up to 2 millimeters thick.

“This is, as far as I know, the first demonstration of super-resolution proteomic imaging of millimeter-scale samples,” Chung says.

“This is an exciting advance for brain mapping, a technique that reveals the molecular and connectional architecture of the brain with unprecedented detail,” says Sebastian Seung, a professor of computer science at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, who was not involved in the research.

Currently, efforts to map the connections of the human brain rely on electron microscopy, but Chung and colleagues demonstrated that the higher-resolution MAP imaging technique can trace those connections more accurately.

Chung’s lab is now working on speeding up the imaging and the image processing, which is challenging because there is so much data generated from imaging the expanded tissue samples.

“It’s already easier than other techniques because the process is really simple and you can use off-the-shelf molecular markers, but we are trying to make it even simpler,” Chung says.

CRISPR in Animals- Simplified. CRISPR is a breakthrough that makes genetic editing easier than ever before. How does it work, and what can it do? You can learn the basics in under 5 minutes from this animation.

Image of the Week – February 13, 2017

CIL:40984 - http://www.cellimagelibrary.org/images/40984

Description: Montage image of a brain stem from a Brainbow transgenic mouse. In Brainbow mice, neurons randomly choose combinations of red, yellow and cyan fluorescent proteins, so that they each glow a particular color. This provides a way to distinguish neighboring neurons and visualize brain circuits. These are large caliber axons of the auditory pathway. First Prize, 2007 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. For additional details see: Livet J, Weissman TA, Kang H, Draft RW, Lu J, Bennis RA, Sanes JR, Lichtman JW. Nature. 2007 Nov 1;450(7166):56-62.

Authors: Jean Livet and the 2007 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition®

Licensing: Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives: This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives License

One of the smoothest, most beautiful color changes I’ve ever seen.

The reaction is methoxymethyl deprotection of one of my agonists with concentrated HCl in acetonitrile as my solvent. The color change doesn’t happen in THF!

COLORS OF CHEMISTRY

The bright colors of chemistry fascinate people of all ages. Hriday Bhattacharjee, a Ph.D. student in the lab of Jens Mueller at the University of Saskatchewan, assembled this showcase from compounds he prepared as well as from some synthesized by the undergraduate students he teaches. Organometallic and inorganic chemistry—the study of molecules like these that involve metal atoms—is especially colorful.

The table below the picture indicates the chemicals seen in the photo.

Submitted by Hriday Bhattacharjee

Do science. Take pictures. Win money: Enter our photo contest.

Feeling a little small? Well in the context of the cosmos, we are small. We may just be little guys living on a speck of dust, afloat in a staggering immensity…

…but we dont think small.