Automated long-term recording and analysis of neural activity in behaving animals
- Harvard University, United States
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
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Synthetic tetrode recording dataset with spike-waveform driftPublicly available at the OpenAIRE project.
Article and author information
Author details
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
© 2017, Dhawale et al.
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.
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Automated long-term recording and analysis of neural activity in behaving animals
eLife 6:e27702.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.27702
