time-lapse of gfp neurons
This short clip shows a sparsely-labeled culture of GFP neurons as they extend axons and dendrites during a key period of synaptic development (days in vitro 5 through 10). Over this period, silent synapses first become active and synaptic transmission in the neural network is initiated.
For this movie, image resolution was reduced about 5x to facilitate easy display; the original size of each frame is about 30 megapixels (with a single pixel width of 167nm). To achieve such high resolution over a large area, each movie frame is a mosaic image of 5x5 individual tiles. The entire field of view (~1mm2) was imaged every 10 minutes continuously over the five day period. One second in the movie equals one hour of realtime. The scale bar is 50um.
For more details on the mixture culture technique and the automated time-lapse setup, please see Sanjana and Seung, Soc. Neuroscience Abs., 2007.