Fostering Discussions and Discoveries at Neuroscience 2024

The SfN annual meeting continues to be an amazing opportunity for researchers around the world to come together to share and discuss their ideas driving innovative neuroscience research. This year, 22,359 attendees, 17,692 of which were scientists, made their way to Chicago for 5 days of presentations, networking, booth discussions, and everything in between at the Neuroscience 2024 meeting.

Inscopix was happy to be a part of Bruker at this year’s meeting in the “Windy City;” this blog highlights our involvement with the Bruker booth and symposium, product theaters, and poster presentations. We also spotlight new initiatives by the Inscopix Discovery Lab and CRO, including innovative work on drug profiling for candidate neurotherapeutics.

“My favorite part of SFN is when PIs bring their new students—and sometimes their families—by the booth to meet us. It’s so special to share face-to-face moments while catching up on science and life. We have such a fun community of researchers; it is exciting to watch it grow.”

Becky Fallon, Sales Development Manager

Becky’s experience at SfN 2024 nicely encapsulates why here at Inscopix, we were so excited for the opportunity to be a part of Bruker’s booth, where we built both personal and professional relationships with visitors.

At the booth, Inscopix showcased its advanced miniscope, multi-region miniscope and behavior system, along with the IDEAS platform. A dedicated team of 14 experts was also on the expo floor to engage attendees in discussions about their lab projects, demonstrating how the platform’s unique single and dual-color imaging in freely behaving animals could accelerate research. Attendees discovered how this integrated system could unlock new insights into disease research, therapeutics, sleep studies, learning, and more. We’re eager to see the breakthroughs that emerge from these exciting collaborations!

Bruker’s symposium, “Multimodal Neuronal-Imaging: From Synapses to Circuits,” had nearly 250 attendees. This event was a great opportunity for several leaders in the field to discuss using cutting-edge techniques, including one-photon, two-photon, super-resolution, and light sheet, to advance scientific knowledge. A highlight of the event was a presentation by special guest Dr. Liset de la Prida from Instituto Cajal, CSIC, who shared groundbreaking insights into how genetically-defined hippocampal subcircuits encode both local and global environmental information—an exciting step forward in understanding cognitive mapping. Attendees enjoyed insightful presentations alongside complimentary desserts, making for a memorable and enriching experience.

Inscopix Discovery Lab showcased powerful new assays for comparative drug profiling of candidate antidepressants and antipsychotics, as well as a vascular imaging assay co-developed with our partners at Lundbeck, which aims to assess therapeutic efficacy for migraines. We’re also excited to announce our expanded in vivo imaging service offerings in partnership with Motac, broadening our capabilities to support preclinical research. These advancements highlight our commitment to accelerating drug discovery and delivering impactful solutions to the neuroscience community.

Our product theater presentation titled “Connect, Scale, Explore” was presented by Brice Tiret, Inscopix Senior Product Manager. The talk went over new advancements and several key features of our technology and software, with the main takeaway that Inscopix’s large array of internal products helps users create a streamlined workflow that accelerates scientific discoveries.

As is the case in any scientific study, evidence is key, so Brice presented a case study looking at the effect of PCP on D2 neurons in the dorsal striatum where Inscopix tools allowed users to accelerate project timelines. These tools will continue to be a key resource for many experiments of this scope.

We also presented the new tracking and closed-loop capabilities of the nVision platform, which truly combines miniscope and behavior channels and analyzes this data in the same environment.

Lastly, we highlighted the latest IDEAS 24.4 release, adding new capabilities for data analysis of 2P data (suite2p) and behavior (training and running DLC models in the platform). These additions will help customers accelerate their research through batch processing and leveraging powerful cloud computing.

Seeing how researchers use our microscopes is incredibly rewarding, so we’re thrilled to announce that Inscopix technology was highlighted in over 80 posters in the MCP hall, showcasing the versatility and impact of our nVue, nVoke, nVista, and Quartet miniscopes in neuroscience. Researchers explored diverse applications, from social behaviors regulated by specific brain regions to anxiety circuits and auditory processing during sleep and learning. Highlights included the Quartet multi-region miniscope, dual dynamic imaging for monitoring transplanted neurons, and the Inscopix Tech award-winning studies on parenting behaviors, anxiety modulation, and basal forebrain function. We’re honored to support this community and witness the transformative potential of our miniscope technology.

We hope you had as great of a time as we did engaging with researchers, friends, and family at SfN 2024. Hopefully, this blog serves as a nice summary of our time at the show and how our team continuously works hard to bring advanced miniscope technology to you—creating opportunities for novel neuroscience research. See you at SfN 2025 in San Diego!

Melissa Martin is the Life Science Writer for Bruker Fluorescence Microscopy with a B.S. in Zoology and Life Sciences Communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is passionate about a wide variety of scientific topics, including brain-neuron behavior and wildlife ecosystem adaptations during climate change. She enjoys conducting interviews and reading about researchers’ work in cell biology, neuroscience, and genomics and hopes to continue to share what she learns with others in an exciting and positive way.