echemi logo
Product
  • Product
  • Supplier
  • Inquiry
    Home > Biochemistry News > Biotechnology News > Zhuang Xiaowei opened the brain's "black box" to uncover the link between cells and behavior.

    Zhuang Xiaowei opened the brain's "black box" to uncover the link between cells and behavior.

    • Last Update: 2020-08-07
    • Source: Internet
    • Author: User
    Search more information of high quality chemicals, good prices and reliable suppliers, visit www.echemi.com
    For decades, scientists have viewed the brain as the body's black box and are keen to parse its secrets.
    recently, Zhuang Xiaowei, a Chinese scholar who won the Science Breakthrough Award last month, and his colleagues opened up this mysterious area: they created a cell map of key brain regions in mice, using sophisticated imaging techniques to examine more than 1 million cells in a 2mm x 2mm x 0.6mm region of the brain, identifying more than 70 different types of neurons, but also pinpointing the location of cells and their multiple functions.
    "This study gives us a breakthrough insight into the cells, molecules, and functional tissues of the brain, and we understand behavior in an unprecedented way that technologies that can be used to parse any function anywhere in the brain," said Catherine Dulac of Harvard University, co-author of the study, entitled "Molecular, spatial and single-cell pro-filing the hypothalamic pre-region."
    ." A conundrum has been realized that in brain research, it needs to understand its cell components, so if you look at a gene that cells express, it tells you how many cell types the brain has, but there's one problem: In separating cells from tissue, scientists lose a valuable piece of information about how cells are organized in brain tissue. "Really want to understand the brain, you also need a spatial context, because brain cells don't organize in a symmetrical way like the liver or other organs, and what's unusual about the brain is that it has a neuronological topology," says
    Dulac.
    so we want to be able to look at a part of the brain and see what cells there are, where they are, and what types of cells are around them. "Now, this new study addresses what Dulac calls this fundamental biological problem and the technical challenges that come with it, "
    .
    2. Killer - MERFISH Zhuang Xiaowei's laboratory has developed a perfect tool for merFISH in recent years. "There are thousands of genes in our cells that are expressed to form the molecular mechanisms that give the cells function," Zhuang said.

    "MERFISH method works by assigning biological barcodes to the RNA of cells, interfeeding them with the DNA probe library to represent these barcodes, and then reading them out by imaging them to determine the identity of a single RNA molecule.
    can read many different barcodes simultaneously with multiple rounds of imaging. "
    One of the amazing characteristics of this approach is the exponential ratio between the number of genes that can be imaged and the number of imaging wheels," says Zhuang.
    MERFISH is very powerful because it allows us to image and distinguish thousands of different RNAs in approximately 10 rounds of imaging.
    ", Zhuang Xiaowei and his colleagues have built a error correction method in MERFISH to ensure that barcodes are read correctly.
    the team did not use all possible barcodes (i.e. one error could cause one code to be misread as another valid code), but instead selected a subset of bar codes that were misread only when multiple errors occurred at the same time, greatly reducing the chance of misidentifying genes.
    " one of the main applications of MERFISH is in situ identification of cell types.
    different cell types have different gene expression spectrums.
    , therefore, these gene expression spectra provide quantitative and systematic methods for cell type identification.
    Because we can do this in a complete tissue through MERFISH imaging, we also provide spatial structures for these cell types.
    , " Zhuang Xiaowei explained.
    . Based on this technique, Zhuang Xiaowei, Dulac and their colleagues set out to study the basic biological problems that have long plagued scientists about how the brain works.
    some regions of the brain, such as the cerebral cortex, have been studied, and although people have noticed that cells are organized in a particular way, there are many brain regions in which we do not know how they are organized.
    the hypothalamus, which was observed in this study, controls social behaviors such as thirst, eating, sleep and social behavior, as well as parenting and reproduction, but we don't know how this brain region is organized.
    to solve the mystery, Zhuang xiaowei and colleagues combined MERFISH with single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq), which not only allows cell types to be classified in the hypothalamus, but also provides molecular characteristics of these cell types and helps select genomes for MERFISH imaging.
    based on these molecular characteristics and other genes with important functions, they used MERFISH to simultaneously image more than 150 genes in the prefrontal prefrontal region of the hypothalamus to identify cell types in situ and map the spatial map of cell locations.
    "scRNAseq and MERFISH both enableus us to identify about 70 different neuron subtypes, most of which were previously unknown, and MERFISH imaging allows us to see an additional distribution of all 70 neuron type and spatial distribution of non-neuron cell types.
    " Zhuang Xiaowei captioned, "You can see that there is a sophisticated space organization that jumps right in front of you."
    not only can you see which neurons are adjacent to each other, but because our images are molecular, you can also identify how these cells communicate with each other.
    in addition, the ultra-high sensitivity of MERFISH imaging allows us to identify low-expression genes that are critical to cell function.
    "4. With this information on the link between cells and behavior, the team began to link specific cells to specific behaviors, and the solution came in the form of a gene called c-Fos.
    c-Fos transcription, known as the immediate early gene, increases during neural activity, so if researchers can track which cells show an increase in genes, they can identify cells that are activated during a particular behavior.
    , for example, by allowing animals to perform parenting-like behaviors, when they observe which cells are c-Fos-positive, researchers can know what cells control parenting behavior.
    in addition to raising offspring, the authors also found cells responsible for other behaviors, such as aggression and mating, and while they found striking commonalities, there were intriguing differences, depending on whether the mice were parents or sexually inexperienced virgins.
    human understanding of their own brain has a long way to go, when the complete deciphering of the human body's black box, but also the interpretation of the secret of life.
    looking to the future, Zhuang xiaowei and his colleagues hope to further explore the structure of the hypothalamus, including designing better ways to understand how cells are interconnected.
    Source: Biological Exploration.
    This article is an English version of an article which is originally in the Chinese language on echemi.com and is provided for information purposes only. This website makes no representation or warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness ownership or reliability of the article or any translations thereof. If you have any concerns or complaints relating to the article, please send an email, providing a detailed description of the concern or complaint, to service@echemi.com. A staff member will contact you within 5 working days. Once verified, infringing content will be removed immediately.

    Contact Us

    The source of this page with content of products and services is from Internet, which doesn't represent ECHEMI's opinion. If you have any queries, please write to service@echemi.com. It will be replied within 5 days.

    Moreover, if you find any instances of plagiarism from the page, please send email to service@echemi.com with relevant evidence.