Category Archives: Neuronal activity

Hodgkin-Huxley model in current clamp and voltage clamp

As a short modeling session for an electrophysiology course at the University of Zurich, I made a tutorial for students to play around with the Hodgkin-Huxley equations in a Colab Notebook / Python, which does not require them to install … 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

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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

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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

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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 cell-attached soundtrack of calcium imaging

Old-school electrophysiologists like to listen to the ephys signals during experiments. For example, this allows to precisely hear when the patch pipette approaches a target neuron. The technique is discussed in the Axon Guide: “Audio Monitor: Friend or Foe?”. The … Continue reading

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Post-publication review: “Precise excitation-inhibition balance controls gain and timing in the hippocampus”

It requires more than a quick look at the abstract and the figures to fully understand a research paper and its limitations. One way to go there is to write a summary or critical review of a paper. In a contribution to … Continue reading

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Annual report of my intuition about the brain

There are not many incentives for young neuroscientists to think aloud about big questions. Due to lack both of knowledge and authority, discussing very broad questions like how the brain works risks to be embarrassing at best. Still, I feel … Continue reading

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Whole-cell patch clamp, part 4: look and feel

In previous blog posts, I have been discussing some aspects of whole-cell patch clamp recordings ([1], [2], [3], [4]). Today, I will show some instructive videos that I recorded during experiments. I’m hoping that they will convey the look and feel … 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

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