Automated long-term recording and analysis of neural activity in behaving animals

Abstract
Data availability
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Abstract

Addressing how neural circuits underlie behavior is routinely done by measuring electrical activity from single neurons in experimental sessions. While such recordings yield snapshots of neural dynamics during specified tasks, they are ill-suited for tracking single-unit activity over longer timescales relevant for most developmental and learning processes, or for capturing neural dynamics across different behavioral states. Here we describe an automated platform for continuous long-term recordings of neural activity and behavior in freely moving rodents. An unsupervised algorithm identifies and tracks the activity of single units over weeks of recording, dramatically simplifying the analysis of large datasets. Months-long recordings from motor cortex and striatum made and analyzed with our system revealed remarkable stability in basic neuronal properties, such as firing rates and inter-spike interval distributions. Interneuronal correlations and the representation of different movements and behaviors were similarly stable. This establishes the feasibility of high-throughput long-term extracellular recordings in behaving animals.

Data availability

The following data sets were generated

(2017) Synthetic tetrode recording dataset with spike-waveform drift
Publicly available at the OpenAIRE project.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.886516

Article and author information

Author details

Ashesh K Dhawale

Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7438-1115
Rajesh Poddar

Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Steffen BE Wolff

Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Valentin A Normand

Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Evi Kopelowitz

Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Bence P Ölveczky

Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

For correspondence
olveczky@fas.harvard.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-2499-2705

Funding

Star Family Challenge Award

Bence P Ölveczky

Human Frontier Science Program

Steffen B.E Wolff

Life Sciences Research Foundation

Ashesh K Dhawale

Charles A. King Trust

Ashesh K Dhawale

National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01 NS099323-02)

Bence P Ölveczky

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (#29-15) of the Harvard University. All surgery was performed under isoflurane anesthesia, and every effort was made to minimize suffering.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.