A biological light sheet links cellular voltage to mesoscopic brain dynamics

Selective Plane Expression (SPress) restricts fluorescent voltage indicator expression to a 20-m-thick plane, enabling high-contrast kilohertz voltage dynamics from hundreds of neurons across millimeter-scale cortex in vivo.

• Why it matters: Cellular-resolution voltage imaging in vivo is constrained by trade-offs between speed, field of view, and optical sectioning, limiting access to large neuronal populations.
• What they did: After one-time two-photon photoactivation, SPress uses gene expression to confine indicator labeling to a user-defined plane, then standard widefield microscopes record kilohertz voltage dynamics.
• The result: The approach reveals mesoscopic subthreshold waves linked to flexible population-wide spike timing reorganization and cellular-scale wavefront microstructure that preserves stereotyped local recruitment biases.

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