Category Archives: Data analysis

Interview with Bruno Pichler

Bruno Pichler studied medicine, obtained a PhD in neuroscience, worked in the labs of Arthur Konnerth, Tom Mrsic-Flogel and Troy Margrie, and was R&D manager at Scientifica, before founding his own company, INSS, “to provide the international neuroscience community with … Continue reading

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Simultaneous calcium imaging and extracellular recording from the same neuron

Calcium imaging is a powerful method to record from many neurons simultaneously. But what do the recorded signals really mean? This question can only be properly addressed by experiments which record both calcium signals and action potentials from the same … Continue reading

Posted in Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, electrophysiology, machine learning, Microscopy, Neuronal activity, zebrafish | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Discrepancies between calcium imaging and extracellular ephys recordings

To record the activity from a population of neurons, calcium imaging and extracellular recordings with small electrodes are the two most widely used methods that are still able to disentangle the contributions from single units. Here, I would like to … Continue reading

Posted in Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, electrophysiology, Imaging, Network analysis, Neuronal activity, Reviews | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Matlab magic spells

Most neuroscientists who analyze their data themselves use either Matlab or Python or both – the use of R is much less common than in other fields of biology. I’ve been working with Matlab on a daily basis for >10 … Continue reading

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Annual report of my intuition about the brain (2019)

How does the brain work and how can we understand it? I want to make it a habit to report some of the thoughts about the brain that marked me most during the past twelve month at the end of … Continue reading

Posted in Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, electrophysiology, machine learning, Network analysis, Neuronal activity, Review | Tagged , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Review: An artificial ground truth for calcium imaging

Selected paper: Charles, Song, Tank et al., Neural Anatomy and Optical Microscopy Simulation (NAOMi) for evaluating calcium imaging methods, bioRxiv (2019). What is the paper about? Calcium imaging is a central method to observe neuronal activity in the brain of … Continue reading

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The power of correlation functions

During my physics studies, I got to know several mathematical tools that turned out to be extremely useful to describe the world and to analyze data, for example vector calculus, fourier analysis or differential equations. Another tool that I find … Continue reading

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Precise synaptic balance of excitation and inhibition

The main paper of my PhD just got published: Rupprecht and Friedrich, Precise Synaptic Balance in the Zebrafish Homolog of Olfactory Cortex, Neuron (2018). (PDF) You might like it if you are also interested in Classical balanced networks Things you … Continue reading

Posted in Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, electrophysiology, Network analysis, Neuronal activity, zebrafish | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Entanglement of temporal and spatial scales in the brain, but not in the mind

In physics, many problems can be solved by a separation of scales and thereby become tractable. For example, let’s have a look at surface waves on water: they are rather easy to understand when the water wave-length is much larger … Continue reading

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Blue light-induced artifacts in glass pipette-based recording electrodes

Recently, I was carrying out whole-cell voltage-clamp and LFP recordings with simultaneous optogenetic activation of a channelrhodopsin using blue light. Whole-cell voltage clamp techniques can record the input currents seen by a neuron (previously on this blog [1], [2]); an … Continue reading

Posted in Data analysis, electrophysiology, Neuronal activity | Tagged , | 2 Comments