C. Elegans
The nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, is an attractive model organism for neuroscience research. Its stereotypic nervous system is composed of just 302 neurons in the hermaphrodites, with the neural connectivity completely mapped. C. elegans’ transparency, small size together with relatively simple nervous system make it ideal for whole nervous system imaging under restrained or freely-moving condition. Of the 302 identifiable neurons, most are densely packed in the head and tail ganglia. The small size of the neurons and the fast swing speed of the head (> 100 µm in less than 1 second) necessitate an imaging system with high spatial and temporal resolution. We demonstrate whole-body dual color GCaMP/RFP recording with single-cell resolution at > 25 volumes per second. Compared with spinning disk confocal systems, SCAPE offers significantly higher temporal resolution and less photobleaching, which is necessary for downstream cell tracking and long-term recording respectively.
See our new SCAPE 2.0 paper for more details:
Voleti V, Patel KB, Li W, Perez Campos C, Bharadwaj S, Yu H, Ford C, Casper MJ, Yan RW, Liang W, Wen C, Kimura KD, Targoff KL, Hillman EMC. Real-time volumetric microscopy of in vivo dynamics and large-scale samples with SCAPE 2.0. Nature Methods. 16(10):1054-62. (2019)