The whole cell at true scale inside the brain. The axon runs from the cell body to the far tips; the dendrites stay close to home.
整个细胞按真实比例置于脑中。轴突从胞体一直延伸到远处的末梢；树突留在胞体附近。
Closer: the cell body with its dendrites lit and the axon stepped back. Everything that reaches this cell arrives on these branches, through thousands of synapses too small to draw at this scale. The next step shows one.
再近一点：胞体和被点亮的树突，轴突退到背景。所有到达这个细胞的信号都落在这些分支上，经由成千上万个在此比例下画不出的突触。下一步展示其中一个。
The frames on the right show a real synapse reconstructed from electron microscopy in the MICrONS volume: one cubic millimetre of primary visual cortex, imaged at a few nanometres. The orange surface is the dendrite of Aura, a layer 5 pyramidal cell, the same class as the cell drawn here and from the same cortex, though a different mouse. The blue surface is Tendril, an inhibitory axon, and the pale dot is where they touch. The cubic millimetre has the rest of that cell.
右侧的两个画面是 MICrONS 数据里由电子显微镜重建的一个真实突触：一立方毫米的初级视觉皮层，以几纳米的分辨率成像。橙色表面是 Aura 的树突，它是一个第 5 层锥体细胞，与这里画出的细胞同类、来自同一皮层，但来自另一只小鼠。蓝色表面是 Tendril，一根抑制性轴突，浅色的点是它们相触的地方。一立方毫米页面有那个细胞的其余部分。
The third frame is a real cryo-electron tomogram: slices one nanometre apart through a synapse in a piece of mouse hippocampus, frozen so fast that the water never formed ice crystals, thinned to about 200 nanometres with an ion beam, and imaged in an electron microscope while still frozen. Nothing is stained and nothing is drawn: the grey is the density of the tissue itself, reconstructed from a tilt series. Scroll through the slices. The axon terminal at the top is packed with synaptic vesicles, each about 40 nanometres across and holding a few thousand glutamate molecules; below it lies the cleft and the cell that receives the signal. The dark dots with bright halos are 3 nanometre gold particles that the authors attached to antibody fragments against GluA2, the AMPA receptor drawn in the next stage, so each dot marks where a receptor sits. This is where the two scales meet: a receptor is about 19 nanometres tall, a fifth of one vesicle.
第三个画面是一张真实的冷冻电子断层图：穿过一块小鼠海马组织中一个突触的切片，相邻切片相距一纳米。组织被极快冷冻，水来不及结晶，再用离子束削薄到约 200 纳米，并在冷冻状态下用电子显微镜成像。没有染色，也没有任何绘制：灰度就是组织本身的密度，由倾斜序列重建而成。滚动切片看一看。上方的轴突末梢挤满了突触囊泡，每个约 40 纳米，装着几千个谷氨酸分子；下方是突触间隙和接收信号的细胞。带亮晕的黑点是作者接在抗 GluA2 抗体片段上的 3 纳米金颗粒，GluA2 正是下一步画出的 AMPA 受体，所以每个点都标出一个受体所在的位置。两种尺度在这里相遇：一个受体约 19 纳米高，是一个囊泡的五分之一。