#NeuroPixels

2025-05-21

The sound of cells in the brain just doesn’t get old! It’s how I fell in love with #neuroscience 🧠🧪👩🏻‍🔬

Celebrating small victories - first #neuropixels recordings in the lab. Congrats to the team that made it happen!

2025-03-21

#PostdocJob from the #RuedigerLab at #UCL, London:

"I’m excited to share that we have an opening for a postdoctoral position in my lab at University College London. This role is funded by the Wellcome Trust and offers a unique chance to join our team as we work to understand how cortical and subcortical visual circuits work together to turn visual signals into learned actions in mice.
In this role, you will:
• Design and perform innovative experiments in head-fixed and freely moving mice
• Use advanced techniques like #Neuropixels recordings and two-photon calcium imaging to monitor and analyze brain activity
• Collaborate closely with a diverse team of experimentalists and computational neuroscientists
• Contribute to the preparation and dissemination of our research findings through publications and conference presentations

This is a fantastic opportunity to make original contributions to our growing research group. If you have a strong background in in vivo physiology, mouse behavioral studies, and relevant data analysis - and you’re eager to expand your skills while playing a key role in our projects - I’d love to hear from you.

For further details, including the full job description, please check out:
Job Ad

I look forward to the possibility of you joining our team.
Sarah"

#NeuroMice #Neuroscience #InVivoEphys

2025-02-19

#NeuroESC #JournalClub
Reading Mental exploration of future choices during immobility theta oscillations

If you've read it, will you let me know what you think?

The authors look at #ThetaSequences in a working memory task in a radial arm maze. They find theta during immobility (makes sense, e.g. we saw that in our two-goals task). They also find that theta sequences might preferentially represent the next goal (also makes sense, e.g. Hippocampal theta sequences reflect current goals)!

I have only done a quick reading so far, but am confused by a few points:

Let me know what you think!

#LeutgebLab #NeuroRat #Neuroscience #SpatialCognition

2024-12-05

Every time I heard that the vertebrate retina does not receive any feedback from the central brain I expressed scepticism, and was told repeatedly that no, feedback fibers running backwards along the optic nerve were never found.

Now*, Sylvia Schröder et al. reports that:

"Arousal modulates retinal output", Schröder et al. 2020 cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896

Recordings with neuropixels probes on the optic tract of the mouse showed changes in retinal ganglion cell (RGC) activity (the output neurons of the retina whose axons make up the optical tract) in concordance with the arousal state of the mouse. They also measured activity of RGC axon boutons in the superior colliculus.

What a fantastic piece of work.

* for long values of "now".

#neuroscience #neuropixels #vision #retina #mouse

Figure 3. Effect of Arousal Is Present in Firing Rates of Retinal Ganglion Cells.

(A) ON and OFF receptive fields of example retinal axons 1 (A1) and 2 (A2).
(B) Spike waveforms of axon 1 (B1) and axon 2 (B2) on multiple neighboring channels of probe when the animal was running (red) or stationary (black) (recorded in darkness).
(C) Traces of running speed (top) and firing rate (bottom) of axon 1 (C1) and axon 2 (C2) recorded in darkness. Grey shades represent periods of running (≥1 cm/s).
(D) Cross-correlograms between firing rate and running speed for axon 1 (D1) and axon 2 (D2). A positive lag denotes that firing rate is lagging running speed. Grey shade shows the 2.5th to 97.5th percentile interval of time-shifted data.
(E) Correlation strengths (measured at lag zero) with running speed in darkness versus the p value of correlation.
2024-09-30

UnitMatch uses only the neurons’ spike waveform to track them across many days. This works really well with high-density probes such as , where the spikes are visible across many recording sites.

2024-05-18

What do #Electrophysiologists who record raw data from many channels (#NeuroPixels, #Hyperdrives…) do for data backup and storage? I just bought 2 x 4Tb external drives and it looks like they won’t be enough (at all). Is there a cheap and reliable AND huge storage way to do this?

#Ephys #NeuroMethods #DataManagement

We're having a bit of a problem with assembling our #neuropixels assembly rig (specifically with the docking holder for the Apollo implant for NP1):
When we try to heat-insert the
brass threads, the walls of the holder holes keep cracking and breaking.
We use a 350C soldering iron, but we have one with a pretty small tip.
Are our brass inserts still too cold? Are we inserting too fast? Any ideas what we might be doing wrong?

2024-01-27

Hi Everyone.

At the beginning of the year I received notice I've got my first funding as a new PI. It's for an ambitious project to look at how the main olfactory system in mice enables individualized social interactions. I wanted to hire a postdoc before, but now I really really want to hire a postdoc. If you know anyone who is at the right stage and might think the picture attached to this post looks cool, please can you share? There's a lot more to it than what's in the diagrams here.

The job ad is in several places including here:
sparksociety.org/resource-blog

#neurojobs #neuroscience #imaging #miniscope #olfaction #olfactory #photometry #electrophysiology #neuropixels

Diagrams illustrating 1. That animals need to tell individuals apart even if they are the same sex or strain. 2. That individual identity cues may be subtle and processes late in the odor processing cycle. 3. An approach for delivering mouse odors with experimental control and the ability to monitor neural activity in the olfactory system in the receiving mouse (i.e., miniscopes).
Carsen Stringer (she/her)computingnature@neuromatch.social
2023-11-01

Jonny Lovelace, Jingrui Ma, ... and Vinny Augustine discovered the vagal pathway underlying fainting, really exciting work, summarized here: nature.com/articles/d41586-023 , full paper here: nature.com/articles/s41586-023 (I helped a little w/ neural analyses)

When the mouse faints, its eyes roll back and most neurons across the brain *shut off completely* (at yellow line in first figure, shows one example #neuropixels recording). But neurons in the hypothalamic PVZ increased their firing during this time period (first group in the second figure). These neurons were causally implicated: inhibition increased fainting duration while excitation increased arousal.

#neuroscience #syncope #fainting #vagal #discovery

Neuropixels recordings during induction of mouse fainting thru vagal stimulation. Neural activity raster, sorted by rastermap, shows a significant decrease in activity after fainting -- shown by the yellow line.Neurons from all recordings, shown during fainting (aka syncope). Neurons in the PVZ increased their activity while most other neurons were suppressed
Matteo CarandiniMatteoCarandini
2023-10-21

Update on tracking neurons across days in recordings: @EnnyvBeest gave a nice talk on it, where she explains UnitMatch. It's a brief talk and it's available online: youtube.com/watch?v=4c_dgTZcBa

Matteo CarandiniMatteoCarandini
2023-10-21

The lectures of the 2023 UCL Neuropixels course are now on YouTube:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfh

The lectures are brief (typically 10-20 minutes) and packed with information. They are a great way to get an introduction to , and to get up to speed on the latest developments.

Thank you to @EnnyvBeest and Celian Bimbard for organizing a fantastic course, and to the lecturers for doing an amazing job!

(more info on the course is at ucl.ac.uk/neuropixels/training).

Matteo CarandiniMatteoCarandini
2023-10-16

New preprint! "Tracking neurons across days with high-density probes", by @EnnyvBeest, Celian Bimbard and team.

Chronic probes can record from the same neurons for days, but require new approaches for tracking neurons.

Enny and Celian developed UnitMatch, which operates after spike sorting and relies only on the neurons' average spike waveform.

They then validated the results with functional responses – which were remarkably stable!

biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20 (1/2)

Left: properties of the spikes (waveform and trajectory of the center of mass). Right: validation with autocorrelogram and correlation with population. Top: two different neurons on the same day. Bottom: the same neuron across different days.
The vOICe vision BCI 🧠🇪🇺seeingwithsound@mas.to
2023-08-28

Ultra-high density electrodes improve detection, yield, and cell type specificity of brain recordings biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20 but #Neuropixels probes offer no brain stimulation; #BCI #NeuroTech

@alicia_izquierdo @elduvelle_neuro our lab does not use dexamethasone with #Neuropixels 🤷‍♂️

Alicia Izquierdo, Ph.D.alicia_izquierdo@neuromatch.social
2023-08-18

@elduvelle_neuro this is great! I’m curious what you and other #Electrophysiologists think of dexamethasone treatment as postop care? It seems a more prevalent practice among those working with #Neuropixels but not amongst the #ephys community-at-large #EphysTip #neuroscience

@susanleemburg @MatteoCarandini @manisha we encase rat #neuropixels implants in a Falcon tube. They're light, rat can't grab anything, and fully protect the hardware. Can share pics if you DM me.

Good afternoon to the coolest of #neuro people! What are your best/favorite #neuropixels headstages for freely moving rats?

The vOICe vision BCI 🧠🇪🇺seeingwithsound@mas.to
2023-08-06

Apollo Implant: Reusable, flexible, and lightweight chronic implants for #Neuropixels probes biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20 by @MatteoCarandini et al.; #BCI #NeuroTech #neuroscience

2023-08-03

From what I can tell, folks that are successfully using #Neuropixels for either acute or chronic recordings are using the metal cap to attach to a dovetail holder. My question for #neuroscience : is there ever a reason to use the version *without* the metal cap?

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