A Blooming Forest of Neurons

At first glance, this image looks like a glowing forest at night. In fact, it reveals a network of neurons in the brain’s motor cortex.

The image was captured by Ph.D. student Pratibha Ahirwal from Prof. Jackie Schiller’s lab at the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and won First Prize in the 2026 Extraordinary Images Competition at the ILANIT Conference.

Pratibha came from India to pursue her Ph.D. at the Technion, where she studies how the brain learns to control movement. Her research focuses on pyramidal tract neurons, among the largest neurons in the brain, which carry motor commands from the cortex to the spinal cord.

The neurons were fluorescently labeled and imaged using a spinning-disk confocal microscope at the Technion Biological Core Facilities (BCF), with assistance from Maya Holdengreber, head of the Light Microscopy Unit.

Under the microscope, the neurons resemble luminous trees: their cell bodies and branching dendrites form a glowing canopy, while their long axons extend downward toward the spinal cord. Visualizing these intricate neural “forests” helps scientists better understand how the brain organizes and controls voluntary movement.

Learn more about the competition:https://www.israel-cores.org/EuBI-IL-IRCF-Microscopy-Image-Contest