Many neuroscientists use calcium imaging to record the activity from neurons (or other cells in the brain). The video below was recorded by Sian Duss and me in hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells in mice.

To make calcium imaging traces comparable across cells and recordings, most researchers use a method called ΔF/F (“delta F over F”) to normalize the fluorescence traces. However, there are different ways to compute ΔF/F, and it is not always obvious how to choose the best method and how to interpret the result.

In a guest blog post for the Scientifica Resource Center, I summarized key suggestions and guidelines on how to compute ΔF/F and how to interpret the results, in particular for GCaMP calcium indicators: How to compute ΔF/F from calcium imaging data.

Let me know if you have any feedback on my suggestions and guidelines!