Institute of Neuroscience, University of Oregon, Eugene, United States.
Department of Biology, University of Oregon, Eugene, United States.
Elife. 2024 May 29;13:RP94167. doi: 10.7554/eLife.94167.
The flow of neural activity across the neocortex during active sensory discrimination is constrained by task-specific cognitive demands, movements, and internal states. During behavior, the brain appears to sample from a broad repertoire of activation motifs. Understanding how these patterns of local and global activity are selected in relation to both spontaneous and task-dependent behavior requires in-depth study of densely sampled activity at single neuron resolution across large regions of cortex. In a significant advance toward this goal, we developed procedures to record mesoscale 2-photon Ca imaging data from two novel preparations that, between them, allow for simultaneous access to nearly all 0f the mouse dorsal and lateral neocortex. As a proof of principle, we aligned neural activity with both behavioral primitives and high-level motifs to reveal the existence of large populations of neurons that coordinated their activity across cortical areas with spontaneous changes in movement and/or arousal. The methods we detail here facilitate the identification and exploration of widespread, spatially heterogeneous neural ensembles whose activity is related to diverse aspects of behavior.
在主动感觉辨别过程中，神经活动在新皮质中的流动受到特定于任务的认知需求、运动和内部状态的限制。在行为过程中，大脑似乎从广泛的激活模式库中进行抽样。要了解这些局部和全局活动模式如何与自发和任务相关的行为相关联进行选择，需要深入研究在单个神经元分辨率下对大片皮质区域进行密集采样的活动。在朝着这一目标迈出的重要一步中，我们开发了从两种新型制备物中记录中尺度 2 光子 Ca 成像数据的程序，它们之间可以同时访问几乎所有的小鼠背侧和外侧新皮质。作为一个原理证明，我们将神经活动与行为基元和高级模式对齐，以揭示存在大量神经元，它们在运动和/或觉醒自发变化时协调其跨皮质区域的活动。我们在这里详细描述的方法有助于识别和探索广泛的、空间异质的神经集合，其活动与行为的各个方面有关。
