On May 27, 2026, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that MRI can noninvasively capture detailed images of the body’s muscles, organs, and bones. It can monitor blood flow to generate a map of brain activity. And with new sensors developed by bioengineers at MIT, MRI can track the kinds of molecules that make our brains and bodies work.

In the May 13 issue of the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team led by Alan Jasanoff, the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Brain Sciences and Human Behavior at MIT, reports on their new sensors, which can brighten or dim MRI signals in response to specific molecular targets. The probes are designed to amplify the effect that each target molecule has on MRI signal, dramatically improving sensitivity over previous small-molecule sensors. Jasanoff, who is also an associate investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, says the approach his team used should enable the development of MRI sensors that detect neurotransmitters and other important molecules in the brain.

“We want to be able to measure distinct chemical signals like neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and metabolites as they fluctuate across the whole brain,” Jasanoff says. “These chemicals are important ingredients in neural computations, and we want to use the types of probes that we developed to detect these signals dynamically.”

The group showed that the new sensors can be delivered systemically, reaching various organs and spreading throughout the brain. This makes them promising tools for brain-wide imaging, as well as imaging targets in the peripheral nervous system or other tissues.

A next step will be engineering LisNRs that respond to the specific neurochemicals that Jasanoff and his team hope to study. “There are something like 100 neurochemicals in the brain that we’d love to detect, in principle,” he says. They’ll start with dopamine and glutamate — two important and relatively abundant molecules that mediate communications between neurons.