Brainbow mice: A dazzling scientific breakthrough
Brain research is sometimes like trying to unravel the world’s most complicated tangle of wires. How can you investigate the connections between neurons when there are billions of them and they all look about the same? Harvard University scientists, aided by innovative thinking and a bit of good fortune, have developed a new way to visualize neurons that makes them far easier to distinguish from one another.
Borrowing from a fluorescent labeling technique that seems space age but is old hat to scientists, Jeff Lichtman and Jean Livet linked several fluorescent proteins together (they called it Brainbow) and devised a way to have only one expressed per neuron. They expected to see standard colors like yellow, red, orange and green. To their surprise, as reported in Nature (November 1, 2007), their idea yielded those colors and many more, totaling almost 90 distinct colors. Further investigation revealed the reason why: the neurons incorporated more than one Brainbow construct and randomly generated different combinations of color to yield the different hues. The resulting images are both scientifically useful and quite visually striking. Indeed, Dr. Livet bested more than a thousand other entries to win the 2007 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition, a prestigious contest for biological and life sciences imaging. The award announcement described the Brainbow mouse images as “resembling a vivid impressionist painting.” These breakthrough mice are now JAX® Mice, available from The Jackson Laboratory.
