I’ve decided to do a few posts throughout the summer about using lightsheet microscopy in neuroscience, as part of my own learning. Today: calcium imaging Lightsheet with its widefield detection can be really fast and gentle to the sample, enabling 100s of frames per second imaging.

You won’t get as deep into your tissue of interest as with two-photon microscopy but many samples are rather transparent or you can measure close to the surface. Prime example being the zebrafish larvae, the iconic Ahrens&Keller publication from 2013 comes to mind www.nature.com/articles/nme...

There, the authors could image the entire brain volume every 1.3 s for an hour with cellular resolution thanks to the speed and low phototoxicity of the lightsheet.

An example I want to highlight here is from a publication that improved cerebral organoid cultivation and included some functional imaging – it makes sense to ask how “good” the generated neurons are in terms of amplitude and frequency of Ca2+ spiking.

video: (Walsh et al., Cell Reports, 2024) Ca2+ activity (GCaMP6m) in LIF treated human cerebral organoids 2 min time-lapse shown at 10x speed acquired at 10 fps www.cell.com/cell-reports... Imaged on Bruker Fluorescence Microscopy Luxendo TruLive 3D microscope www.bruker.com/de/products-...