Fig.: Electrophysiologically and/or chemically characterized neurons

Biocytin filled interneuron from the somatosensory cortex of a rat counterstaind with an antibody against VIP. The specimen was kindly provided by Dr. J. Staiger (C. & O. Vogt-Institute for Brain Research, Univ. Düsseldorf) and scanned by confocal laser scanning microscopy.Because at the choosen magnifaction (Fluotar 40 x Oil NA 1.0) one image stack covered only a field of view of 225,28 µm x 225,28 µm a total of 3 x 4 stacks was necessary to cover the complete dendritic and axonal extend of 675,84 µm (x) x 901,12 µm (y) x 72,32 µm (z). In z-direction 64 focal planes with a pixel resolution of 1024 x 1024 were scanned at stepping size of 1.13 µm resulting in 128 MB files (per image stack) for the two channels scanned simultaneously. In order to acquire and handle such large data sets of 1,54 GB images were obtained by using multiple image stack acquisition software ( MIS-A ) and multiple image stack browser ( MIS-B ) (Zuschratter et al., 1998, Zerbe et al., 1999).

Electrophysiological recording and visualization of dendritic dynamics in hippocampal slice preparations by 2Photon microscopy. The sequence shows only small morphological changes in dendritic spines of a CA1 pyramidal cell filled with Lucifer Yellow during a recording period of about 2h. Note that the recording at the end of the observation period differs only slihtly from that at the beginning. Preparation, patch clamp recording and 2 Photon microscopy was done by M. Sokolov, Department of Electrophysiology.