Hopes for the New Year

Here’s the news Labrigger hopes to see in 2011.

New developments with optical indicators

A new, super bright fluorescent protein that blows the doors off of GFP-based proteins.
Bright, far-red dyes with huge 2p cross-sections.
Higher S:N genetically-encoded voltage and calcium sensors.
Better fluorescent dyes for calcium, sodium, and chloride.

I know we’ll see important steps in one or more of these areas.

Technical equipment

Molecular Devices updates the software for their patch clamp amplifiers, and makes the new pCLAMP ABF data file format open source.
Seriously.

High-speed 3D AOD scanning goes mainstream.
It’ll happen. But I’m not sure how much progress we’ll see this year.

Mathworks releases a native version of MATLAB for OSX.
This won’t happen– they’re more likely to abandon OSX altogether– but we can hope. I do all my analysis via Remote Desktop already, but sometimes it’s nice to have it running locally.

Software

Better open source data analysis with Python
Many neuroscientists have been programming different applications in Python: visual stimuli, neuronal models, psychophysics experiments, electrophysiology data acquisition, etc. However, until there is an organized package for programming GUIs, controlling DAQs, and doing data analysis with Python, MATLAB, Igor Pro, and other commercial programs will dominate. Eclipse is a nice package, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not going to get most people to switch from MATLAB or LabView.