Events
Whole Brain Imaging For Quantitative Profiling of Neural Complexity and Disease
The Institute of Artificial Intelligence for Digital Health invites you to attend its monthly seminar series, which will feature Dr. Zhuhao Wu, an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Abstract
Recent advancements in tissue clearing and whole mount imaging have enabled high-content quantitative analysis of cellular complexity in large intact organs like adult mouse brain. Wu’s group has continued to develop new versions of iDISCO-family tissue clearing protocols to enable more facile and accurate imaging of diverse genetically and molecularly defined patterns across whole mouse brains, while also scaling our approach to large human brain samples. Complete and well-preserved tissue morphology in 3D imaging also facilitates incorporation of automatic data registration and analysis pipelines to integrate different imaging modalities for brain-wide anatomical and patho histological profiling across scales. This will provide a new platform for studying basic brain composition, development, and wiring, as well as a broad range of neurological and psychological diseases.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Zhuhao Wu received B.S. in Biological Sciences and Biotechnology from Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he started developing his interest in brain research. He then went to the Johns Hopkins University to obtain a PhD in Neuroscience, working on the cellular and molecular mechanisms mediating the initial sensory circuitry assembly using Drosophila genetics in Dr. Alex Kolodkin’s laboratory to help elucidating how our brains are properly built to response to the environment. After PhD, he came to New York and did his postdoctoral training at the Rockefeller University. He worked with Dr. Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Dr. Jeffrey Friedman to further study how brain circuitries are precisely formed under guidance signaling regulations, and how they may get disrupted in mutant and injury. Motivated by the many unanswered questions in this field, his recent research has been focused on developing novel imaging approaches to better understand the detailed structural and functional properties of the brain. He has developed a series of advanced tissue clearing and imaging techniques (iDISCO, iDISCO+, and Adipo-Clear) to visualize fine molecular and anatomical patterns in large intact organs. By literally turning a brain fully transparent, these methods enable fast and accurate visualization of the intricate neural features inside. Some of the popular applications include profiling brain-wide activity landscape to interpret normal and aberrant animal behaviors, tracing the enormous neuronal complexity to study their formation and mature functions, and detecting pathological initiation and progression in the whole brain.