A new technology developed at MIT enables scientists to label proteins across millions of individual cells in fully intact 3D tissues with unprecedented speed, uniformity, and versatility. Using the technology, a research team was able to richly label large tissue samples in a single day.

Nearly 50 years ago, neuroscientists discovered cells within the brain’s hippocampus that store memories of specific locations. These cells also play an important role in storing memories of events, known as episodic memories. While the mechanism of how place cells encode spatial memory has been well-characterized, it has remained a puzzle how they encode episodic memories.

A new model developed by MIT researchers explains how those place cells can be recruited to form episodic memories, even when there’s no spatial component. According to this model, place cells, along with grid cells found in the entorhinal cortex, act as a scaffold that can be used to anchor memories as a linked series.

The roundworm C. elegans is a simple animal whose nervous system has exactly 302 neurons. Each of the connections between those neurons has been comprehensively mapped, allowing researchers to study how they work together to generate the animal’s different behaviors.

Steven Flavell, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and investigator with the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, uses the worm as a model to study motivated behaviors such as feeding and navigation, in hopes of shedding light on the fundamental mechanisms that may also determine how similar behaviors are controlled in other animals.