#xnh — Public Fediverse posts

"Critical point drying of brain tissue for X-ray phase-contrast imaging", Khan et al. 2026 (Schaefer's and Bosch's labs).
https://journals.iucr.org/s/issues/2026/03/00/wuz5001/index.html

"we propose to replace interstitial material by air to enhance X-ray phase contrast of the ultrastructural features. Critical point drying (CPD) of heavy-metal-stained mouse brain tissue produced samples with preserved ultrastructure, a nanofoam-like material that remains compatible with follow-up conventional resin embedding. Using two synchrotron-based setups [...] we found that CPD samples consistently showed 2–4× stronger phase-shift signal than samples embedded in resin."

#neuroscience #XNH #synchrotron

"Functional mapping of the molluscan brain guided by synchrotron X-ray tomography", Crossley et al. 2025
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40014565/

#neuroscience #Lymnaea #molluscs #XNH

Now that's a big deal, and from a very credible source:

"Self-supervised image restoration in coherent X-ray neuronal microscopy", Laugros et al. (Alexandra Pacureanu) 2025
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.10.633538v1.full

"we present a self-supervised image restoration approach that simultaneously improves spatial resolution, contrast, and data acquisition speed. This enables revealing synapses with XNH, marking a major milestone in the quest for generating connectomes of full mammalian brains."

X-ray nanoholography took a turn towards higher resolution and higher throughput.

#XNH #connectomics #neuroscience