A dye-based imaging technique known as two-photon microscopy
can produce pictures of active neural structures in much finer detail than
functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, but it requires powerful and
expensive lasers. Now, a research team at the University of Pennsylvania has
developed a new kind of dye that could reduce the cost of the technique by
several orders of magnitude.
The study was led by associate professor Sergei Vinogradov
and postdoctoral researcher Tatiana Esipova, both of the Department of
Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine,
along with Christopher Murray, a professor in the departments of Chemistry in
the School of Arts and Sciences and of Materials Science and Engineering in the
School of Engineering and Applied Science.