Amygdala is an almond shape region in the brain which has a crucial role in fear or emotional memory. This image is a close look of this region that I took with a Leica microscope just recently.These are the neurons that got beautifully activated by a fear stimulus in the amygdala of a genetically engineered mouse brain. The bright yellow fluorescence is like a reporter saying which neurons were involved. It's very important to see what is it that some neurons can be activated because of the trigger and the other not. What are the factors that make them different from each other.
The method that we just started to use is new and seems promising. What you can see under the microscope is astonishing, really amazing!
9 comments:
One interesting thing is that a mammal can learn to avoid something from a single bad experience. It doesn't need repeated episodes as in Pavlov's dog training.
Nice picture.
what is your major for research? Biology perhaps?
WOW, I couldn't guess it is a section of brain. i would say it's a kind of galaxy..just amazing
Beautiful image!
I'm with Hiva on its similarity to a galaxy. The brain is absolutely amazing.
Q: So the mouse was alive? I'm so curious to know how this new imaging method works.
amazing picture, you do cool stuff girl :)
This guy is doing some very interesting work on associative learning in the fly brain:
http://www.neuroscience.ox.ac.uk/directory/gero-miesenboeck
It's a fascinating subject. Am curious what you'll discover.
Thank you all for your enthusiasm :)
Don,
The design of memory related experiments in our lab and the ones I know is heavily based on conditioning model but this mouse only had one fear(cued)conditioning training, I'm very interested to see what would be the results after I apply the complete protocol.
Atefeh,
Yes, that's right, specifically on molecular neurobiology.
Nava jan, the mouse was sacrificed the same day he got trained, the microscopic study was not done in vivo but in vitro. Sure, I'll write more on this.
Post a Comment