Night Talk Friday: How to study the brain at the nanoscale

Our brains are made up of billions of nerve cells that communicate with each other through tiny contact points called synapses. But how do you study something so incredibly small? In this talk, I’ll show how we use special electron microscopes to “zoom in” on the building blocks of the brain, all the way down to individual molecules. I’ll explain how we build synapses in the lab, how we freeze them, and how we imagine them using the electron microscope. In this way, we try to understand how healthy brains make connections— and what goes wrong in brain diseases.

Check her lab for more info www.dimphnameijerlab.org