The Allen Institute built a high-throughput, automated electron microscopy pipeline and took ~125,000,000 pictures of a tiny sample of brain tissue to reveal its fine wiring.

For decades, researchers used a process called serial-section electron microscopy to aid their understanding of the brain. This type of imaging requires cutting brain samples into ultra-thin slices and taking pictures of those slices with an electron microscope. Those images can then be sandwiched together to create a three-dimensional picture of brain cells and their connections. Historically, this work has been painstakingly done by hand.

To speed the process, researchers at the Allen Institute built a high-throughput electron microscopy pipeline called piTEAM: parallel imaging transmission electron automated microscopes. Details of this pipeline published on October 2, 2020, in the journal, Nature Communications. Read the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18659-3 

At Luxel, we are proud that our innovative GridTape® was used to collect the precious 40nm thick tissue sections in this breakthrough project.

Source: The Allen Institute