Author Archives: P.T.R. Rupprecht

Interesting papers on the role of cell organelles of neuronal dendrites in calcium signaling

Researchers utilize calcium imaging to track neuronal activity in the brain, highlighting the role of calcium as a signaling molecule. Recent studies investigate intracellular calcium dynamics, particularly its coupling between organelles and its influence on synaptic plasticity in dendrites. Findings emphasize the necessity of in vivo methods for accurate insights into neuronal behavior. Continue reading

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Interesting papers on VIP interneurons in cortex and hippocampus

Interneurons are inhibitory neurons in the brain that are thought to shape the computations performed by principal cells. The effects of inhibition can be rather diverse, depending on which neurons – or which parts of a neuron (dendrites, soma, or … Continue reading

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Accurately computing noise levels for calcium imaging data

It is fascinating how much data quality can vary between different calcium imaging data sets. In this blog post, I will discuss a metric to quantify and compare data quality and in particular shot noise between calcium imaging datasets. This … Continue reading

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Open PhD position in my research group

Are you a finishing Master’s student with a quantitative background and are interested in neuroscience? This is your opportunity. Project: You will be supervised by Dr. Peter Rupprecht and Prof. Fritjof Helmchen at the Brain Research Institute, University of Zurich. … Continue reading

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How to compute ΔF/F from calcium imaging data

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 … Continue reading

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Online spike inference with GCaMP8

Calcium imaging is used to record the activity of neurons in living animals. Often, these activity patterns are analyzed after the experiments to investigate how the brain works. Alternatively, it is also possible to extract the activity patterns in real … Continue reading

Posted in Brain machine interface, Calcium Imaging, closed-loop, Data analysis, electrophysiology, Imaging, machine learning, neuroscience | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Detecting single spikes from calcium imaging

There are two mutually exclusive holy grails of calcium imaging: First, recording from the highest number of neurons simultaneously. Second, detecting spike patterns with single-spike precision. This blog post focuses on the latter. Many studies have claimed to demonstrate single-spike … Continue reading

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Protocols to check the performance of your multiphoton microscope

In an exceptionally useful paper, Lees et al. provide a set of protocols for checking the performance of your multiphoton microscope: Standardized measurements for monitoring and comparing multiphoton microscope systems (link to preprint). The paper covers the following procedures: Check … Continue reading

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Non-linearity of calcium indicators: history-dependence of spike reporting

Calcium indicators are used to report the calcium concentration inside single cells. In neurons, calcium imaging can be used as a readout of neuronal activity (action potentials). However, some calcium indicators like GCaMP transform the calcium concentration of a cell … Continue reading

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How to use Google Scholar as a neuroscientist

Google Scholar is a search engine for scientific publications. There are alternatives like PubMed (not a search engine but a database, often used in the medical field), Semantic Scholar (also a database, but with richer annotations), Citation Gecko (to discover … Continue reading

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