Technologies

Light-Sheet Microscopy & Virtual Reality for whole-brain imaging and voltage imaging

While commercial microscopes are often "one-size-fits-all," we have engineered a custom light-sheet system specifically optimized for the larval zebrafish. Because these larvae are naturally transparent, they offer a unique opportunity to observe the inner workings of a vertebrate brain in its entirety without invasive procedures.

Our setup takes full advantage of this transparency by using a thin "sheet" of laser light to scan the brain layer by layer at high speeds. To further our research, we have integrated this imaging with a customized virtual reality (VR) environment. This allows us to present various types of stimuli—such as visual cues, cold stress and water flow—and record how the brain responds in real-time. By combining whole-brain imaging with controlled VR landscapes, we can map the neural circuits responsible for how an organism processes information and decides on a course of action.

High-Throughput Behavioral Tracking

While zebrafish are an ideal model for drug discovery, traditional methods for tracking their movement often face a trade-off between speed and scale. To bridge this gap, our lab developed a novel platform capable of capturing the millisecond-timescale body kinematics of multiple unconfined fish simultaneously.

By integrating a high-performance 100 GbE camera with real-time GPU data compression, we can monitor the precise movements of many fish in large, separate arenas without losing a single frame of detail. This high-throughput approach allows us to detect subtle behavioral "fingerprints" that indicate affective states, such as stress or resilience. We recently utilized this tool to uncover how certain compounds influence behavior at a granular level, demonstrating that when you scale precision, you unlock deeper insights into how drugs and genetics shape animal behavior.