I don’t know about you, but I often get fascinated by the mere visualization of brain imaging data. Aside with the neuroimaging blobologies, but looking at more detailed visualizations of brain parts and processes strike me as merely beautiful and fascinating. And, as the fascination of looking at a star may be deepened by knowing more about that exact star (e.g., it’s the leftovers from a supernova), knowing what you see in the image of the brain may provide more understanding of what we see, and why it looks just that way.
Just as with this cover image from a recent issue of Cerebral Cortex, in which the caption says:
Photomontage showing two consecutive coronal sections of an E12 mouse embryo after 24 hours of being in toto culture. After a CFDA injection into the rostro-medial telencephalic wall, labeled cells (green) migrate tangentially by the ventral telencephalon and reach the olfactory cortex, which is immunohistochemically stained against calretinin (red) and calbindin (pseudocolor orange). The blue color shows the DAPI unspecific staining of nuclei. Superimposed, the black and white figure shows an embryo head injected with the fluorescent tracer DiI (red).
Or, put more simple, it’s an image showing how cells migrate during embryonic development. The article can be found here.
-Thomas
