Serial section Microscopy is an established method for volumetric anatomy reconstruction. Section series imaged with Electron Microscopy are currently vital for the reconstruction of the synaptic connectivity of entire animal brains such as that of Drosophila melanogaster. The process of removing ultrathin layers from a solid block containing the specimen, however, is a fragile procedure and has limited precision with respect to section thickness. We have developed a method to estimate the relative z-position of each individual section as a function of signal change across the section series. First experiments show promising results on both serial section Transmission Electron Microscopy (ssTEM) data and Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) series. We made our solution available as Open Source plugins for the TrakEM2 software and the ImageJ distribution Fiji.

The molecular and cellular architecture of the organs in a whole mouse is revealed through optical clearing.

Central nervous system (CNS) function is dependent on the stringent regulation of metabolites, drugs, cells, and pathogens exposed to the CNS space. Cellular blood-brain barrier (BBB) structures are highly specific checkpoints governing entry and exit of all small molecules to and from the brain interstitial space, but the precise mechanisms that regulate the BBB are not well understood. In addition, the BBB has long been a challenging obstacle to the pharmacologic treatment of CNS diseases; thus model systems that can parse the functions of the BBB are highly desirable. In this study, we sought to define the transcriptome of the adult Drosophila melanogaster BBB by isolating the BBB surface glia with fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) and profiling their gene expression with microarrays. By comparing the transcriptome of these surface glia to that of all brain glia, brain neurons, and whole brains, we present a catalog of transcripts that are selectively enriched at the Drosophila BBB. We found that the fly surface glia show high expression of many ATP-binding cassette (ABC) and solute carrier (SLC) transporters, cell adhesion molecules, metabolic enzymes, signaling molecules, and components of xenobiotic metabolism pathways. Using gene sequence-based alignments, we compare the Drosophila and Murine BBB transcriptomes and discover many shared chemoprotective and small molecule control pathways, thus affirming the relevance of invertebrate models for studying evolutionary conserved BBB properties. The Drosophila BBB transcriptome is valuable to vertebrate and insect biologists alike as a resource for studying proteins underlying diffusion barrier development and maintenance, glial biology, and regulation of drug transport at tissue barriers.

Intracellular recording allows precise measurement and manipulation of individual neurons, but it requires stable mechanical contact between the electrode and the cell membrane, and thus it has remained challenging to perform in behaving animals. Whole-cell recordings in freely moving animals can be obtained by rigidly fixing ('anchoring') the pipette electrode to the head; however, previous anchoring procedures were slow and often caused substantial pipette movement, resulting in loss of the recording or of recording quality. We describe a UV-transparent collar and UV-cured adhesive technique that rapidly (within 15 s) anchors pipettes in place with virtually no movement, thus substantially improving the reliability, yield and quality of freely moving whole-cell recordings. Recordings are first obtained from anesthetized or awake head-fixed rats. UV light cures the thin adhesive layers linking pipette to collar to head. Then, the animals are rapidly and smoothly released for recording during unrestrained behavior. The anesthetized-patched version can be completed in ∼4-7 h (excluding histology) and the awake-patched version requires ∼1-4 h per day for ∼2 weeks. These advances should greatly facilitate studies of neuronal integration and plasticity in identified cells during natural behaviors.

A neuron is a basic physiological and computational unit of the brain. While much is known about the physiological properties of a neuron, its computational role is poorly understood. Here we propose to view a neuron as a signal processing device that represents the incoming streaming data matrix as a sparse vector of synaptic weights scaled by an outgoing sparse activity vector. Formally, a neuron minimizes a cost function comprising a cumulative squared representation error and regularization terms. We derive an online algorithm that minimizes such cost function by alternating between the minimization with respect to activity and with respect to synaptic weights. The steps of this algorithm reproduce well-known physiological properties of a neuron, such as weighted summation and leaky integration of synaptic inputs, as well as an Oja-like, but parameter-free, synaptic learning rule. Our theoretical framework makes several predictions, some of which can be verified by the existing data, others require further experiments. Such framework should allow modeling the function of neuronal circuits without necessarily measuring all the microscopic biophysical parameters, as well as facilitate the design of neuromorphic electronics.

Mutations in methyl-CpG-binding protein 2 (MeCP2) cause Rett syndrome and related autism spectrum disorders (Amir et al., 1999). MeCP2 is believed to be required for proper regulation of brain gene expression, but prior microarray studies in Mecp2 knock-out mice using brain tissue homogenates have revealed only subtle changes in gene expression (Tudor et al., 2002; Nuber et al., 2005; Jordan et al., 2007; Chahrour et al., 2008). Here, by profiling discrete subtypes of neurons we uncovered more dramatic effects of MeCP2 on gene expression, overcoming the "dilution problem" associated with assaying homogenates of complex tissues. The results reveal misregulation of genes involved in neuronal connectivity and communication. Importantly, genes upregulated following loss of MeCP2 are biased toward longer genes but this is not true for downregulated genes, suggesting MeCP2 may selectively repress long genes. Because genes involved in neuronal connectivity and communication, such as cell adhesion and cell-cell signaling genes, are enriched among longer genes, their misregulation following loss of MeCP2 suggests a possible etiology for altered circuit function in Rett syndrome.

The increasing IC manufacturing cost encourages a business model where design houses outsource IC fabrication to remote foundries. Despite cost savings, this model exposes design houses to IC piracy as remote foundries can manufacture in excess to sell on the black market. Recent efforts in digital hardware security aim to thwart piracy by using XOR-based chip locking, cryptography, and active metering. To counter direct attacks and lower the exposure of unlocked circuits to the foundry, we introduce a multiplexor-based locking strategy that preserves test response allowing IC testing by an untrusted party before activation. We demonstrate a simple yet effective attack against a locked circuit that does not preserve test response, and validate the effectiveness of our locking strategy on IWLS 2005 benchmarks.