A (Very) Close Look Inside the Zebrafish Brain

About a year ago I wrote a story about the hottest new animal model in neuroscience: baby zebrafish. The critters are not much to look at. They’re the size and shape of a curled eyelash, with big bulging eyes. But when some neuroscientists look at the fish, they see a lot of potential. The fish have around 300,000 neurons — enough to perform relatively complex behaviors, such as swimming in different directions and learning to fear certain stimuli. And most importantly, the embryonic fish are transparent, making it easy to watch their brain cells in action, all at once.This week Eric Betzig of HHMI’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, reports in Nature Methods a new technology that dramatically sharpens those microscopic images. You can see for yourself in the video below, which shows neurons deep in the midbrain of a living, 3-day-old zebrafish.Source: Sugarlash ProOnly Human, April 2014.