{"id":237410,"date":"2026-05-19T19:15:30","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T00:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/a-new-imaging-approach-captures-brain-activity-across-nine-cell-types-at-once"},"modified":"2026-05-19T19:15:30","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T00:15:30","slug":"a-new-imaging-approach-captures-brain-activity-across-nine-cell-types-at-once","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/a-new-imaging-approach-captures-brain-activity-across-nine-cell-types-at-once","title":{"rendered":"A new imaging approach captures brain activity across nine cell types at once"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-new-imaging-approach-captures-brain-activity-across-nine-cell-types-at-once.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Scientists at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience (MPFI), in collaboration with ZEISS and MetaCell, have developed a powerful new imaging pipeline called Neuroplex. As described in a paper <a href=\"https:\/\/elifesciences.org\/articles\/110277\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>eLife<\/i>, the technique allows simultaneous monitoring of the activity of up to nine distinct neuronal populations in freely moving mice, dramatically accelerating the pace of scientific exploration into how the brain controls behavior.<\/p>\n<p>For years, neuroscientists linking brain activity to behavior have faced a fundamental limitation: <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/news\/2025-04-mounted-microscope-reveals-high-resolution.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">Miniscopes<\/a>, the tiny head-mounted microscopes used to observe neural activity in behaving animals, could capture neural activity, but couldn\u2019t reliably distinguish more than two different types of brain cells at a time.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo understand the brain, we need to link patterns of activity in specific neurons to behavior,\u201d stated lead author Dr. Mary Phillips. \u201cWe can readily use labels to color-code different populations of neurons, but when using miniscopes to correlate neural activity to behavior, we couldn\u2019t distinguish more than two of these populations. This made it difficult to compare the activity across multiple cell types and circuits to understand how specific circuits regulate behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience (MPFI), in collaboration with ZEISS and MetaCell, have developed a powerful new imaging pipeline called Neuroplex. As described in a paper published in eLife, the technique allows simultaneous monitoring of the activity of up to nine distinct neuronal populations in freely moving mice, dramatically accelerating the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}