A new method labels thousands of neurons in a fraction of the time

This is pretty cool. Slicing remains a relatively tough/lossy process, since I understand it's challenging to maintain the integrity of the tissue through the slicing and extraction process, especially for something as finicky as RNA, but the rest of this process dramatically increases the observability PDF these neuronal processes.

Wonder if this has been added to the Human Connectome Project[1] yet.

[1] http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org

I hope stuff like this becomes something anyone could have access to, I'm super curious to learn more about how I think and how my brain works, I'd love to be able to just go to the mall and get a brain barcode and fmri done, heh. :)

In the mean-time you could read this book, which should give you quite a few pointers in how your brain works and how it affects your behaviour:

https://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Life-Your-Brain/dp/14447088...

Is there any hope for an imaging device to map the brain that isn't so invasive? Similar to an MRI?

Not really. Due to diffraction, the wavelength you need to resolve an axon (let alone the much more challenging dendritic projections) is on the order of a micron, which is near infrared. Unfortunately, our skulls are opaque in this wavelength. You could possibly do X-rays, but the consensus is that blasting your head with the amount of ionizing radiation you'd need is a Bad Idea™.

There's possibly some room for a clever super resolution technique, but I haven't seen anything about it (it's also not my field).

High-throughput mapping of single neuron projections by sequencing of barcoded RNA http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/High-throughput%20mapp...

Rosetta brains: A strategy for molecularly-annotated connectomics http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/Rosetta%20brains:%20A%...

Conneconomics: The economics of large-scale neural connectomics http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/Conneconomics:%20The%2...

On optical detection of densely labeled synapses in neuropil and mapping connectivity with combinatorially multiplexed fluorescent synaptic markers http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/On%20optical%20detecti...

Rapidly evolving homing CRISPR barcodes http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bio/Rapidly%20evolving%20hom...

Molecular recordings by directed CRISPR spacer acquisition http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bio/Molecular%20recordings%2...

Massively parallel whole-organism lineage tracing using CRISPR-Cas9 induced genetic scars http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bio/Massively%20parallel%20w...

Neuroanatomy goes viral http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/Neuroanatomy%20goes%20...

some FISSEQ stuff - http://gnusha.org/logs/html/2016-07-14.log.html http://gnusha.org/logs/html/2016-07-13.log.html http://gnusha.org/logs/html/2016-08-19.log.html

(.ots timestamps available..)

"One weird barcode trick.."

This is the first research where my first reaction was "Noooo, don't do that!" I don't want my axons glowing green.

Maybe I'm not bio punk enough, but playing with mouse brain viruses needs to be done carefully.

// Second reaction was awesome tech.

Heh, so far HN leans that research in viruses targeting brain cells doesn't need to be done carefully.

I think the long term implications of such tech are more interesting than this research itself.