Splashing neurons with colour to track their development.A big problem when trying to monitor the wa

Splashing neurons with colour to track their development.A big problem when trying to monitor the ways in which cells change over time is that of consistently identifying the same one. In the tangled billions of neurons in animal brains, this careful art only becomes more complicated. A research team headed by the University of Southampton has described a possible solution to this problem: use a viral vector to uniquely colour individual cells to keep track of them. Pretty much any RGB colour can be chosen to paint cells as is needed. This way, the problem is reduced to a matter of finding the ‘red one’ among the rest. The colouration of cells marked in this way is permanently ingrained in DNA, and so is inherited by any daughter cells produced. Using this technique, scientists may soon better understand how connections are made in the brain, how early embryonic development occurs and more simply by watching those processes at the cellular level.  -- source link

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