I recently visited this site - http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/10/the_100_colours_of_the_brainbow.php - and while I couldn't understand a lot (okay, most) of the science involved, I was blown away by the colors. It's amazing to see such beauty in our brains.
I wanted to create this blog to share both things that I make as well as things that I am learning about as I try to move forward in this incredibly changing world.
For you and those reading, the colours are created by natural fluorescent proteins--the same fluorescent proteins that make jellyfish fluoresce. It is very common to use these proteins in molecular biology, but not in such a dramatic, stunning and promising way.
ReplyDeleteWhen you add a gene for a fluorescent protein to the entire animal, you end up with something like the GFP bunny:
http://www.conncoll.edu/ccacad/zimmer/GFP-ww/cooluses8.html
For Brainbow, they limited the expression of the gene to just the brain. They also used a few different fluorescent proteins... green, yellow, cyan, others?... so that gives you a small number of colours in your palette.
The real elegance of Brainbow is that they designed a strategy whereby the DNA selects a combination of proteins at random. Expressing more than one colour at once gives you a whole new colour. In each cell, you will get some random combination, and neighbouring cells will often be different colours.
The purpose of Brainbow is to trace how the neurons connect together. Each neuron cell (the 'blobs') has a bunch of connections (the 'strings') to other cells. Now that each cell and its connections will be colour-coded, it is going to be possible to trace where all those connections go. That will give us a great deal of new information about the brain's connectivity.