This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: It can't be heard, but different parts of the human body are in constant conversation, communicating to keep the entire system running efficiently. For biologists, being able to listen in on this discussion is a long-sought-after goal.
Over the years, researchers have caught snippets of these exchanges, but the complete dialogue has remained out of reach. Now, scientists at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus have figured out a way to hear the entire conversation. WHOLISTIC, or WHole Organism Live Imaging System for recording Tissue and IntraCellular activity, lets researchers simultaneously record real-time communication signals coming from nearly every cell in a living vertebrate.
The work is published in the journal Nature. The technique, developed by Virginie Ruetten, a postdoc in the lab of Janelia Senior Group Leader Misha Ahrens, and collaborators, captures the cellular activity of all the biological systems in a young zebrafish at once—from the cardiovascular system to the digestive system to the nervous system—providing a complete, concurrent picture of how they interact as the fish swims, eats and sleeps. It's a first step toward understanding the machinery of more complex organisms, like humans.
Uncovering what each cell in our body is saying, when and to whom would deepen our understanding of how bodies work and what happens when they don't, opening potential new paths to treat many diseases. "We know that evolution has produced functioning organisms, but evolution didn't care whether a decision was implemented in the brain's prefrontal cortex or in a connection between the brainstem and the bladder," says Ahrens. While different biological disciplines have been focused on certain systems and scales, "this now allows all these fields—physiology, neuroscience, behavior, cell biology—to connect and study all of them in the same animal." Nearly every cell in the body uses calcium to communicate with its neighbors.
By tracking these signals, scientists can understand how cells work together to carry out many different processes, from moving a muscle to fighting an infection. More than a decade ago, the Ahrens Lab and collaborators pioneered methods to image calcium signals across the entire brain of a larval zebrafish. They developed ways to outfit neurons with sensors that light up when there's a change in calcium and to see these signals inside the tiny, transparent fish as it behaves under a microscope.
For WHOLISTIC, Janelia researchers, working with collaborators at University College London, Virginia Tech and Tsinghua University, built on this work: The method allows researchers to study the fish at both the level of individual cells and the whole organism, all at once, says Ruetten, who performed the research as a joint graduate student with Ahrens and Maneesh Sahani, director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL. "This work bridges two fundamental scales of biology—the cell and the organism—such that we can now fill that observability gap," Ruetten says. "There are some really basic properties that were just missing because it's been very difficult to look at cellular responses at scale." Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly.
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