New Radioactive Tracer Lights Up Brain’s Connections to Study Disorders
Various brain disorders change the physical nature of synapses in the brain, but this fact has been useless in clinical practice because evaluating these changes could only be done once the patient passes away. Now researchers at Yale University have developed a technique, published on in journal Science Translational Medicine, that relies on PET (positron emission tomography) and a novel tracer to image billions of synapses at the same time. Their radioactive tracer was engineered to grab onto the synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2A (SV2A), which after injection can be viewed on a PET scanner.…
Read More