The need for calcium imaging in nonhuman primates: New motor neuroscience and brain-machine interfaces.

The need for calcium imaging in nonhuman primates: New motor neuroscience and brain-machine interfaces. Exp Neurol. 2016 Aug 7; Authors: O'Shea DJ, Trautmann E, Chandrasekaran C, Stavisky S, Kao J, Sahani M, Ryu S, Deisseroth K, Shenoy KV Abstract A central goal of neuroscience is to understand how populations of neurons coordinate and cooperate in order to give rise to perception, cognition, and action. Nonhuman primates (NHPs) are an attractive model with which to understand these mechanisms in humans, primarily due to the strong homology of their brains and the cognitively sophisticated behaviors they can be trained to perform. Using electrode recordings, the activity of one to a few hundred individual neurons may be measured electrically, which has enabled many scientific findings and the development of brain-machine interfaces. Despite these successes, electrophysiology samples sparsely from neural populations and provide little information about the genetic identity and spatial micro-organization of recorded neurons. These limitations have spurred the development of all-optical methods for neural circuit interrogation. Fluorescent calcium signals serve as a reporter of neuronal responses, and when combined with post-mortem optical clearing techniques such as CLARITY, provide dense recordings of neuronal populations, spatially organized and annotated with genetic and anatomical information. Here, we exhort that this methodology,...
Source: Experimental Neurology - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Exp Neurol Source Type: research