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A half-pipe curved two-photon whole brain scan of larvae zebrafish

A team of ÈÕº«ÎÞÂë researchers have designed a low-cost, easily implemented, and openly accessible technique to improve two-photon microscopes, regularly used in the monitoring of neuronal activity.

Two-photon microscopy is key to much of neuroscience research as it allows scientists to non-invasively monitor the activity of neurons in the brains of live animals, such as mice, zebrafish or fruit flies, at cellular resolution.

Most commercially available two-photon microscopes have a limitation in that they offer a limited field of view, and offer only limited options for 3D imaging, meaning they cannot concurrently display neurones separated by depth. This limits the scope of information obtained and therefore the biological questions which can be addressed using the equipment.

In the past, researchers have used a great profusion of “tricks” to overcome these limitations – however most are complicated and/or expensive (often doubling the £200,000 - £500,000 cost of the microscope itself) .

However, a team of researchers have now come up with a solution at a fraction of the cost (£1,000) and, critically, one which can be easily implemented, and removed, in a matter of hours.

, Professor of Neuroscience, said: “Sussex is well-known for Neuroscience research and in the School of Life Sciences we have one of the highest densities of two-photon microscopes in the UK. We’ve been experimenting as to how to overcome their limitations. We’ve come up with a simple low-cost solution, which basically involves swapping a number of lenses and exploiting some optical design tricks.

“A larger community of people with two-photon microscopes can now easily afford improvements to their existing systems, substantially boosting their performance. In addition, in the future companies can build these microscopes from scratch based on these ideas, which should not inflate the cost in any way.”

is published in Nature Communications.