Category: New Publication

We are happy to announce that a new manuscript entitled “Simultaneous, cortex-wide and cellular-resolution neuronal population dynamics reveal an unbounded scaling of dimensionality with neuron number” has been uploaded to the bioRxiv preprint server. The brain’s remarkable properties arise from collective activity of millions of neurons. Widespread application of dimensionality reduction to multi-neuron recordings implies that neural dynamics can be approximated by low-dimensional “latent” signals reflecting neural computations. However, what would be the biological utility of such a redundant and metabolically costly encoding scheme and what is the appropriate resolution and scale of neural recording to understand brain function? Imaging the activity of one million neurons at cellular resolution and near-simultaneously across mouse cortex, we demonstrate an unbounded scaling of dimensionality with neuron number. While half of the neural variance…

Our article entitled “Mesoscale volumetric light field (MesoLF) imaging of neuroactivity across cortical areas at 18 Hz” has been published in Nature Methods. Information flow across mesoscale, i.e., multi-millimeter-sized regions of the mammalian cortex is a key feature of high-level cognition and is known to underlie complex behaviors. Yet, tracing this information flow in a volumetric fashion at a cellular resolution and high speed has remained challenging. This is primarily because most established neuronal activity imaging methods, such as two-photon microscopy, rely on time-consuming point-by-point scanning of an excitation beam focus to read out neuronal activity, as reported by the fluorescence rate of designer proteins known as genetically encoded calcium indicators (GECIs). We present a modular, mesoscale light field (MesoLF) imaging hardware and software solution that allows recording from thousands of…

Excited to share our new manuscript showing volumetric Ca imaging of 1 million neurons across the mouse cortex at cellular resolution using Light Beads Microscopy (LBM). Two-photon microscopy together with genetically encodable calcium indicators has emerged as a standard tool for high-resolution imaging of neuroactivity in scattering brain tissue. However, its various realizations have not overcome the inherent tradeoffs between speed and spatiotemporal sampling in a principled manner which would be necessary to enable, amongst other applications, mesoscale volumetric recording of neuroactivity at cellular resolution and speed compatible with resolving calcium transients. In this paper, we introduce Light Beads Microscopy (LBM), a scalable and spatiotemporally optimal acquisition approach limited only by fluorescence life-time, where a set of axially-separated and temporally-distinct foci record the entire axial imaging range near-simultaneously, enabling volumetric…

Our review article entitled "A Guide to Emerging Technologies for Large-Scale and Whole-Brain Optical Imaging of Neuronal Activity" has been published (more…)

Our article entitled "Brain-wide 3D light-field imaging of neuronal activity with speckle-enhanced resolution" has been published in Optica. We introduce a new high-speed (more…)

Our paper entitled “Video rate volumetric Ca2+ imaging across cortical layers using Seeded Iterative Demixing (SID) microscopy” has been published in Nature Methods. (more…)

Our paper entitled “Fast volumetric calcium imaging across multiple cortical layers using sculpted light” has been published in Nature Methods. In this work, we present a (more…)

Our paper entitled "A force-induced directional switch of a molecular motor enables parallel microtubule bundle formation" by Maxim I. Molodtsov et al. has been published in Cell. Microtubule-organizing centers (MTOCs) nucleate microtubules that can grow autonomously in any direction. To generate bundles of parallel microtubules originating from a single MTOC, the growth of multiple microtubules needs to coordinated, but the underlying mechanism is unknown. Here, we show that a conserved two-component system consisting of the plus-endtracker EB1 and the minus-end-directed molecular motor Kinesin-14 is sufficient to promote parallel microtubule growth. The underlying mechanism relies on the ability of Kinesin-14 to guide growing plus ends along existing microtubules. The generality of this finding is supported by yeast, Drosophila, and human EB1/Kinesin-14 pairs. We demonstrate that plus-end guiding involves a directional switch…