Non Destructive Imaging Of Tissue Ultrastructure With X Ray Connectomics

Maps of biological tissues at subcellular to ultrastructural detail hold key insights to mechanistically understand how organs and organisms work. In the brain, such 3D maps provide the location, morphology and connectivity of all cells inside – the connectome.

While volume electron microscopy is the current golden standard for connectomics1, hard X-ray nanoimaging brings important advantages:

Hard X-rays can penetrate mm into heavy metal-stained tissues with preserved ultrastructure, enabling non-destructive 3D imaging without slicing the sample

Phase contrast imaging has resolved 4nm detail in computer chip samples2 and 40nm detail in brain tissue3

4th generation synchrotrons create X-ray beams with enough flux to image petavoxels in days4

Multiple synchrotrons are building tissue nanoimaging beamlines for their 4th generation sources, starting by the European Synchrotron (Grenoble, France) and ALBA (Cerdanyola del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain). A customised design for connectomics enables tailored compromises so the target datasets can be obtained robustly.

In this talk, Carles will review how X-ray nanoimaging can be most useful in combination with the rich toolbox that is available to connectomics researchers, highlighting critical adjacent technologies and use cases.