This picture is slightly unsettling, it has a very alien quality about it. Awesome shit.
The damn japanese and their food amirite fellow american grandpas.
The brain is up top, and the descending bits are equivalent to the spinal cord of the fly. Blue and yellow are two types of neurons that I care about, each expressing a different genetically-encoded fluorescent protein!
That is confirmed 100% cool and also pretty disgusting looking. How did you take the picture? A visible light camera with a really big lens?
Thank you! It's really gross to dissect them, too, haha... It's very tiny (this picture is 400 um x 1100 um) so you have to use a microsope. This is a really cool microscope because instead of taking the picture at once, it actually scans over the sample with a laser in 3D and collects the light from each point, took about an hour for this sample (it's called confocal microscopy if you want to google it).
Is this for some kind of lab you work in or just a very intriguing hobby?
it’s part of my work in a lab! you have to be pretty rich to own one of these scopes
That is fascinating work. What kind of dissection tools did you use?
I'll have to try that. My Japanese grandpa used to do this all the time, just repeatedly all day while crying, with any animal that couldn't run fast enough. Said it let the poison out of his brain.
This is amazing.
What's the shiny, blue lattice-looking stuff near the top of the picture?
What are the golden strands going down the spinal cord?
I just got this picture so I'm trying to figure out what the blue stuff is myself! I'm using this new technique called trans-tango. So the golden strands are neurons that we know the identity of (I don't want to get to specific here to not dox myself... small field), and the blue are the neurons that the gold neurons connect to.
I think we labelled too many with the gold, so it's a little challenging to see what's going on... But it's pretty nonetheless!
Sooooo cool :chavez-salute: :sankara-salute: :fidel-salute: :maduro-salute:
These are false colored. I used GFP and RFP as the two channels and then colored GFP as gold and RFP as blue because red-green colorblind comrades deserve to see pretty pictures too.
extremely cool! i know you said this was for lab work, but what are you working on? (if you can share, of course)
Thank you! I don't wanna dox myself since it's a pretty small field but generally studying how different types of sensory information are integrated into movement.
as the proud owner of a small brain, i can only say that sounds both important and difficult! thank you for sharing this with us 😄
I dont want to be a bitch nor to claim to be an expert but insects brain are stupidly simple. They are viruses of consciousness. Some insects have neurons that go from their eyes directly to their wings. Litterally "if see_light_approaching then flap_harder". They're little more than protein robots.
Feel free to yell at me i might have it completely wrong my only sources are the internet xdxd
The "eye to wing" pathway that you're describing is part of what we're studying!
Sure, but none of that means vegans aren't opposed to killing insects
if you are the type of vegan who dislikes bringing harm to animals welp
