Cultured rat brain cells are being employed at the University of Florida to pilot a simulated plane. The experiment, designed by biomedical engineering professor Thomas DeMarse, entails 25,000 cortical neurons extracted from a rat embryo that were placed on a multi-electrode array. The neurons established their own connections soon after they were plated, essentially forming a living computation device, or brain. Linked to a computer, the activity of the neurons was monitored and utilized to control the flight path of a jet in a simulated program. A two-way connection made it possible to teach the cells how to properly navigate the plan so that over time the cells were able to pilot the craft successfully even in simulated poor weather conditions. This and other similar studies may eventually pave the wave for hybrid computers that include organic parts.

In order to visualize myelin sheaths and astroglia in a rat brain sagittal tissue section (shown above), the specimen was immunofluorescently labeled with mouse anti-myelin BP and rabbit anti-GFAP primary antibodies followed by goat anti-mouse and anti-rabbit secondary antibodies conjugated to Alexa Fluor 488 and Alexa Fluor 568, respectively. Hoechst 33342 was employed to counterstain cell nuclei. Images were recorded in grayscale with a 12-bit digital camera coupled to a Nikon Eclipse 80i microscope equipped with bandpass emission fluorescence filter optical blocks. During the processing stage, individual image channels were pseudocolored with RGB values corresponding to each of the fluorophore emission spectral profiles.