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Population imaging of ongoing neuronal activity in the visual cortex of awake rats

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Abstract

It is unclear how the complex spatiotemporal organization of ongoing cortical neuronal activity recorded in anesthetized animals relates to the awake animal. We therefore used two-photon population calcium imaging in awake and subsequently anesthetized rats to follow action potential firing in populations of neurons across brain states, and examined how single neurons contributed to population activity. Firing rates and spike bursting in awake rats were higher, and pair-wise correlations were lower, compared with anesthetized rats. Anesthesia modulated population-wide synchronization and the relationship between firing rate and correlation. Overall, brain activity during wakefulness cannot be inferred using anesthesia.

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Figure 1: Comparison of firing rates obtained using two-photon calcium imaging of L2/3 populations in awake and subsequently anesthetized animals.
Figure 2: Action potential firing is temporally structured in both awake and anesthetized states.
Figure 3: Correlated action potential firing in pairs and populations of L2/3 neurons in the awake and anesthetized animal.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Brecht, W. Denk and B. Sakmann for encouragement and generous support, M. Kaiser for outstanding technical support, M. Hauswirth, M. Lukat, K. Schmidt and J. Tritthardt for help with microscope modification, and M. Brecht, K. Briggman, W. Denk and D. Wallace for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. This work was supported by the Max Planck Society.

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Author notes

  1. David S Greenberg and Arthur R Houweling: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cell Physiology, Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Jahnstrasse 29, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany.,

    David S Greenberg

  2. Network Imaging Group, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Spemannstraße 41, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.,

    David S Greenberg & Jason N D Kerr

  3. Department of Neuroscience, Erasmus Medical Center, PO Box 2040, 3000 CA, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.,

    Arthur R Houweling

  4. Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Humboldt University, Philippstr. 13, Haus 6, 10115 Berlin, Germany.,

    Arthur R Houweling

  5. Department of Biomedical Optics, Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Jahnstrasse 29, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany.,

    Jason N D Kerr

Authors
  1. David S Greenberg
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  2. Arthur R Houweling
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  3. Jason N D Kerr
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Contributions

J.N.D.K. and A.R.H. conceived, designed and carried out the experiments. D.S.G. developed the spike-detection and movement-correction algorithms. D.S.G. and A.R.H. tested correlation measures. D.S.G. and J.N.D.K. analyzed the data. D.S.G. and J.N.D.K. wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jason N D Kerr.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–9 and Supplementary Methods (PDF 2191 kb)

Supplementary Movie 1

Example of motion corrected two-photon imaging (WMV 7427 kb)

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Greenberg, D., Houweling, A. & Kerr, J. Population imaging of ongoing neuronal activity in the visual cortex of awake rats. Nat Neurosci 11, 749–751 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2140

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2140

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