Category: Papers

Finding out who cites your body of work

One of the most common ways that universities and institution use to evaluate scientists is to solicit letters of recommendation. But who should they ask? Of course former mentors will write letters. To get a…



Custom touchscreen behavior systems for rodents

Lisa Saksida and Tim Bussey turned touchscreen systems into high throughput tools for rodent behavior assays. When I visited their lab in Cambridge (they’re now based at U Western Ontario in London, Canada, between Detroit,…



Detailed protocol for IV viral injections to drive systemic transgene expression


CRISPR/Cas9 technology has greatly accelerated the development of genetically engineered mice, but it’s still a big investment of time before the mice are ready. For quicker turnaround, there are other options (and speed isn’t the…



Real-time tracking and 2p imaging with sub-ms timing

In this work, the authors used fast optical motion tracking and 2p imaging to measure the activity of individual neurons in freely moving animals. No surgery. No optical window. No restraint. And all the benefits…



Democratized state-of-the-art neuroscience

Andre and colleagues have a preprint up on their project generating inexpensive instrumentation for imaging and optogenetics experiments. The 100 Euro Lab: A 3-D Printable Open Source Platform For Fluorescence Microscopy,…



Pixy computer vision for tracking mouse behavior

Pixy is an open source computer vision system. Mostafa Nashaat, Robert Sachdev, and colleagues including Matthew Larkum have developed software for use with the Pixy, that can be used to track mouse behavior, including free movement around…



DIY 1060 nm fiber laser

For less than $13,000, you can build your own fiber laser and get pretty nice images with it.



moco, fast open-source motion correction for 2-photon calcium imaging movies

Results are similar to the slow version of TurboReg, but it runs about twice as fast as the fast version of TurboReg.

Here’s the paper.
Here’s the code.



2-photon calcium imaging of the mouse retina in vivo

Bar-Noam et al. 2016 (Shy Shoham’s lab) figured out how to image the mouse retina with 2-photon microscopy in vivo.



Constrained non-negative matrix factorization for calcium imaging data analysis

I tweeted about this last fall. This is the best algorithm I’ve seen for segmenting and extracting time course from calcium imaging data. Eftychios Pnevmatikakis developed the code in Liam Paninski’s lab. The…



New category of posts: papers

In the past, Labrigger has only rarely posted about relevant papers. That ends today. Now there’s a new post category for papers, and it’ll be used to highlight publications that are of potential interest to you,…