Automated task training and longitudinal monitoring of mouse mesoscale cortical circuits using home cages
- University of British Columbia, Canada
- University of Britsih Columbia, Canada
Abstract
We report improved automated open-source methodology for head-fixed mesoscale cortical imaging and/or behavioral training of home cage mice using Raspberry Pi-based hardware. Staged partial and probabilistic restraint allows mice to adjust to self-initiated headfixation over 3 weeks' time with ~50% participation rate. We support a cue-based behavioral licking task monitored by a capacitive touch-sensor water spout. While automatically head-fixed, we acquire spontaneous, movement-triggered, or licking task-evoked GCaMP6 cortical signals. An analysis pipeline marked both behavioral events, as well as analyzed brain fluorescence signals as they relate to spontaneous and/or task-evoked behavioral activity. Mice were trained to suppress licking and wait for cues that marked the delivery of water. Correct rewarded go-trials were associated with widespread activation of midline and lateral barrel cortex areas following a vibration cue and delayed frontal and lateral motor cortex activation. Cortical GCaMP signals predicted trial success and correlated strongly with trial-outcome dependent body movements.
Data availability
The name of each brain imaging file which contains both the mouse ID and the time stamp can be found in the SQL database (RFIDtag_xxxx_timestamp.raw; see Methods for URL and hosted as a full text file archive on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3268838) for the 5 cages of male mice that compose figures 1-7 and cage 6 female mice https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/9RFXRP.All text file behavioral data is included online as well as image data for figures 8 and supplemental figure 2 are found on https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3243572, all data files and code for figures 9 and 10 are found in https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/ZTOPUM and female mouse behavioral data https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/9RFXRP. All Python data acquisition code can be found on https://github.com/jamieboyd/AutoHeadFix/ and https://github.com/ubcbraincircuits/AutoHeadFix.
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Code and .mat files for automated homecage paper (Figs 9 and 10)https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/ZTOPUM.
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Home cage data female mice cage 6 all text file and database informationhttps://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/9RFXRP.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (FDN-143209)
- Timothy H Murphy
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All procedures were conducted with approval from the University of British Columbia Animal Care Committee and in accordance with guidelines set forth by the Canadian Council for Animal Care.
Copyright
© 2020, Murphy 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 task training and longitudinal monitoring of mouse mesoscale cortical circuits using home cages
eLife 9:e55964.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.55964
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