Thank you for concise explanation :). I guess that I must have overestimated the macroscopic change following denaturation. Hypothetical question: to my understanding MRI machines are calibrated to resonate with water molecules (hence the reason behind these darker areas on the picture you showed would be "because they contain more fat molecules than water, there would be lesser presence of water and less signal would be registered back"). Assuming that we could rehydrate the sample to its former state (or perhaps do so selectively to some type of interesting structures, but I don't think it's a viable method) and also assuming that water concentration in the gel itself would be isotropic, is there anything useful that we could learn resulting from using MRI on the enlarged sample?
Np, this all falls under the category of connectomics / next-gen proteomics, so I'm always happy to discuss it. I doubt it, MRI's advantage is as a non-invasive imaging tool. You can look at changes in blood flow, inflammation, structural damage, etc, without having to open up the organism or stick any probes (other than maybe contrast agents in the blood) inside. Taking out an organism's brain just to stick it back in an MRI, instead of using a finer microscope, renders those advantages invalid. At best, you could create a full 3D image of a tissue without having to cut it into slices (even expanded, the tissue tends to scatter light after a few cm). But iirc, even the strongest MRI magnets have a resolution limit around a millimeter in scale, compared to light microscopes, which can get micrometer resolution without much difficulty. For connectomics, you want a method that can image down to the synapse (Resolution ~= 100s of nm), but also do so at a wide enough scale so as to capture information on the whole brain / brain region (1 cm - 10 cm). But that's still not a solved problem outside of brute-forcing it with millions of knife slices and decades of microscope time.Thank you for concise explanation :). I guess that I must have overestimated the macroscopic change following denaturation.
is there anything useful that we could learn resulting from using MRI on the enlarged sample?