Winfried Denk, Arthur Konnerth, Karel Svoboda and David Tank win The Brain Prize. ( http://www.thebrainprize.org/flx/prize_winners/ )
The scientists will share the 1 million Euro prize, to be presented on May 7 in Copenhagen by Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, for their invention and development of two-photon microscopy, a transformative tool in brain research.
Two-photon microscopy has dramatically changed the way we study the brain. It combines advanced techniques from physics and biology to allow scientists to examine the finest structures of the brain in real time. Using this revolutionary technology, researchers are now able to examine the function of individual nerve cells with high precision, especially how nerve cells communicate with each other in networks. This is a huge step forward in the understanding of the physical mechanisms of the human brain and how the brain's networks process information. In addition, researchers have been able to follow how connections between nerve cells are established in the developing brain. It has led to the identification of signaling pathways that control communication between nerve cells and provide the basis for memory, and it has enabled the study of nerve cell activity in the networks that control vision, hearing and movement.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/sf-wda030615.php
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2015, @12:52PM
Here are a couple pictures for those that do not know why two-photon microscopy is great for tissue samples:
http://parkerlab.bio.uci.edu/pictures/build2photon/2_P%20principleJ.JPG [uci.edu]
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_IrTaoLin3Gc/S_Q_loiV-mI/AAAAAAAAAH0/ih6r1BYQ0SA/s1600/TwoPhotonMicroscopy.png [blogspot.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by moondrake on Wednesday March 11 2015, @01:23PM
Although they got the Brain price, I would like to add that 2-photon fluorescence microscopy is useful for far more research outside of neurology. It has better penetration dept compared to traditional fluorescence and gives you the ability to do deeper "virtual" sectioning of all kind of materials (you are a bit limited though by the dyes that can be used).
2-photon is not really new anymore (it was developed in the 90s I think), I guess you can only see the impact of new technologies in hindsight. A more recent exciting development is light-sheet fluorescence [wikipedia.org] microscopy. Which I recently played around with (just like 2-photon, it was not so useful for what I tried to image though).