# Brainbow **Entity class:** Combinatorial multicolor cell-labeling method **Collection:** [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]] **Canonical source articles:** [[articles/The Organic-Synthetic Brain Atlas|The Organic-Synthetic Brain Atlas]] · [[articles/Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer|Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer]] ## Definition **Brainbow** uses recombinase-controlled stochastic expression of fluorescent proteins to assign distinguishable color combinations to neurons and other cells. The original 2007 work demonstrated that combinatorial optical labels could make individual cells and their processes distinguishable within dense tissue. Brainbow is an ancestry of PRISM's identity-through-combination strategy, but the methods are not interchangeable. Brainbow is constrained by a resolvable optical color palette; PRISM uses iteratively detected antigenic protein bits to expand the identity space and supplies the measured barcode signal to segmentation and proofreading. ## Relationships - **Conceptual ancestry of:** [[wiki/PRISM (E11 Bio)|PRISM (E11 Bio)]]. - **Related method:** [[wiki/Protein Barcoding|protein barcoding]]. - **Boundary:** combinatorial multicolor labeling is not the same as iterative antigenic protein-barcode readout. - **Collection route:** [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]]. ## Sources - [Nature — Transgenic strategies for combinatorial expression of fluorescent proteins in the nervous system](https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06293)