Geng Xinling, Wu Jian-Young
Capital Medical University, School of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Biomedical Instrumentation, Beijing, China; Georgetown University, Department of Neuroscience, Washington, DC, United States.
Georgetown University , Department of Neuroscience, Washington, DC, United States.
Neurophotonics. 2017 Jul;4(3):031207. doi: 10.1117/1.NPh.4.3.031207. Epub 2017 Mar 9.
Among many distinct contributions made by Amiram Grinvald's group, the "Blue dyes" is a special gift for visualizing cortical population neuronal activity. The excitation wavelength of blue dyes has minimal overlap with the absorption of hemoglobin, and hence has minimal pulsation artifacts. This advantage leads to high signal-to-noise ratio optical recordings of cortical activity, with sensitivity as good as that of local field potential recordings. High sensitivity imaging allows for recording of spontaneous and evoked activity in single trials without spatial or temporal averaging, and has benefitted many scientists in their research projects. Single trial recording is particularly important for studying the cortex, because spontaneous and ongoing activities interact with sensory evoked events, creating rich dynamics in the wave patterns. Signal averaging in space and time would diminish the dynamic components in the patterns. Here, we discuss how the blue dyes help to achieve high-sensitivity voltage-sensitive dye imaging of spontaneous and evoked cortical activities. Spontaneous cortical activity has a constantly changing spatial pattern and temporal frequency, making it impossible to average in space and time. Amiran Grinvald's invention of blue dyes made it possible to examine the spatiotemporal patterns of cortical dynamics, about 15 years before the first useful genetically coded voltage proteins became available.
在阿米拉姆·格林瓦尔德团队做出的众多杰出贡献中，“蓝色染料”是用于可视化皮层群体神经元活动的一项特殊成果。蓝色染料的激发波长与血红蛋白的吸收光谱重叠极少，因此产生的脉动伪影也极少。这一优势使得皮层活动的光学记录具有高信噪比，其灵敏度与局部场电位记录相当。高灵敏度成像能够在不进行空间或时间平均的情况下，记录单次试验中的自发活动和诱发活动，这让许多科学家在他们的研究项目中受益匪浅。单次试验记录对于研究皮层尤为重要，因为自发活动和持续活动与感觉诱发事件相互作用，在波形中创造出丰富的动态变化。在空间和时间上进行信号平均会削弱这些模式中的动态成分。在此，我们将探讨蓝色染料如何助力实现对自发和诱发皮层活动的高灵敏度电压敏感染料成像。自发皮层活动具有不断变化的空间模式和时间频率，因此无法在空间和时间上进行平均。阿米拉姆·格林瓦尔德发明的蓝色染料使得在首个实用基因编码电压蛋白问世约15年前，就能够研究皮层动力学的时空模式。
