Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Nov 15, 2011, 8:41 pm
GCaMP3 is now officially old skool. GCaMP5 is available at addgene.
Plasmid 31788: pCMV-GCaMP5G, a.k.a. GCaMP3-T302L R303P D380Y
Dimmer baseline F, higher dF/F, picks up significantly more activity in vivo cortex. Still not holy grail level, but getting closer.
Filed under: Calcium Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Nov 15, 2011, 8:34 pm
Wednesday morning, I’m giving the first public presentation of my current work on sensory coding in the barrel cortex. The big picture question is, How does the cortex translate sensory input into perception and recognition of objects and their position?
To study this cortical function, we used a... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Aug 19, 2011, 3:48 pm
Guoping Feng’s group has released what looks to be a very useful set of BAC transgenic Channelrhodopsin mice. The four lines specifically express YFP-tagged ChR2 in GABAergic, cholinergic, serotonergic and parvalbumin-expressing neurons.
They are well characterized and available from Jackson la... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Apr 29, 2011, 4:10 pm
This one is for the aficionados. Here is a little review of four classic single-unit physiology papers investigating the response properties and information flow from whisker through thalamus and into cortex. It’s quite interesting comparing this data taken from sedated or anesthetized rats to m... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Apr 13, 2011, 1:27 am
I spent the last two nights arguing with a friend about the potential danger of radioactive fallout from Fukushima. I contended any US fallout was negligible, he disagreed. This led to reading a Science magazine post outlining the high soil contamination readings near Fukushima, and then to the ... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Mar 3, 2011, 11:00 am
This is straying pretty far from the usual blog posts, but its topical. Listening to Bill Simmons’s podcast with Chuck Klosterman while driving home last night got me thinking about the role of confidence in society. Would be interested in hearing feedback on it.
A common reaction to periods ... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Feb 16, 2011, 8:51 am
A short paper in Optics Express looks interesting. In A high speed wavefront determination method based on spatial frequency modulations for focusing light through random scattering media, Meng Cui presents a method for rapidly determining the optimal wavefront to ‘cancel out’ the scattering w... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Feb 8, 2011, 10:05 am
Nature methods published two papers which extend brainbow-like techniques of stochastic multicolored neuronal labeling into fruit flies. Nature’s summary explains the two methods.
dBrainbow expression examples
The first technique, called dBrainbow, was developed by Julie Simpson, ... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Feb 2, 2011, 10:44 pm
Trying to start a reboot of the posts here on Brain Windows. Lots of great stuff has come out since the last regular posting period, and unfortunately I don’t have the time to cover it all. One of the most exciting papers of the last few months was Rapid blue-light–mediated induction of protei... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Sep 15, 2010, 3:23 pm
The DIADEM automated neuronal reconstruction contest has finished. Accurate, fast, and high-resolution automated neuron reconstruction is of vital importance to cracking the mystery of how neural circuits perform. Even with perfect knowledge of the firing patterns of every cell in a circuit, our u... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Aug 20, 2010, 7:51 pm
Three excellent pieces of neuroscience software have been recently updated or freshly released. I have used two of them, Ephus and ScanImage, on a daily basis as primary data collection tools. The third, Neuroptikon, is quite useful for post-hoc illustration of neural circuits.
Ephus is a modular... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Aug 9, 2010, 11:52 pm
Takeharu Nagai’s lab has published in Nature Methods, Spontaneous network activity visualized by ultrasensitive Ca2+ indicators, yellow Cameleon-Nano, demonstrating a new set of calcium indicators based on yellow cameleon. Back when he was still Take-san, Take’s ability to churn out and manually... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Aug 6, 2010, 11:01 am
News of a cool new toy comes from a colleague’s recent trip out to the MBL @ Woods Hole. It is the perfect gift to spark the curiosity of a budding young (or old) neuroscientist. Backyard Brains makes the world’s best value electrophysiology rigs. The SpikerBox comes pre-assembled for $100 o... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Mar 26, 2010, 3:57 pm
The Deissseroth lab has released an updated version of their optical neuronal silencing gene Natronomonas halorhodopsin. In Molecular and Cellular Approaches for Diversifying and Extending Optogenetics, Gradinaru et al review current optogenetic methodology, and introduce eNpHR3.0-2A-ChR2, a gen... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Mar 23, 2010, 10:31 am
Brain Windows just won the expert-level category for the researchblogging.com 2010 awards! Thank you for voting. I will try to keep the posting frequency and quality up. And I finally figured out how the citation thing works with researchblogging.org so all my new posts will be included on their ... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
I somehow missed that Josh Vogelstein’s method on action potential detection was published last summer. In Spike Inference from Calcium Imaging Using Sequential Monte Carlo Methods, the authors use a Monte Carlo approach to determine spike times from calcium imaging with superior performanc... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
Inhibition has a powerful role shaping the network dynamics of the cortex, but most studies of inhibitory circuitry are done in brain slice or anesthetized animals. In Membrane potential dynamics of GABAergic neurons in barrel cortex of behaving mice, Gentet et al use two-photon imaging to guide dua... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
Whoa! ResearchBlogging.org just listed the finalists for their 2010 blogging awards. Brain Windows is one of five finalists for Expert-Level research blog of the year.
Cynics might say that giving out small monetary awards ($50, oh yeah baby!) and allowing voting only by bloggers registered by ... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
Wired has a nice lay-person write-up of the rapidly developing field of compressed sensing. This is a technique that allows accurate reconstructions of highly undersampled sparse datasets. This field really took off in 2004 when Emmanuel J. Candès discovered that a tomography phantom image could b... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
A few papers on in vivo calcium imaging have just come out and are worth a careful read.
The first two examine the fine organization of layer 2/3 of the mouse auditory cortex. The canonical view of auditory cortex organization is that neurons are arranged in a tonotopic pattern, with a smooth gra... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
Another take on Free Will from Luke Surl comics…
Filed under: Fun, philosophy Tagged: comic, free will Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
“If you find yourself needing to reread this paragraph, perhaps it’s not that well written. Or it may be that you are low on acetylcholine.” Acetylcholine (ACh) is a major modulator of brain activity in vivo and its release strongly influences attention. If we could visualize when and where ... Comment - Like
Andrew H. posted an article on
Brain Windows
-
Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
Atsushi Miyawaki’s lab has developed a series of neat tools for visualizing cell cycle progress.
For zebrafish, the zFucci system consists of two fluorescent proteins, mKO2 and mAG, that are fused to Cdt1 and geminin genes. Cell cycle- regulated proteolysis of these fusion proteins causes each ... Comment - Like
Recent Discussions
