Tag: behavior

Headplate designs

Multiphoton imaging with micron resolution in living animals can be challenging because they…



Postdoc job: Zebrafish, Natural scenes, Thiele lab, Toronto

The Thiele Lab at the University of Toronto is recruiting a Postdoc for the Fall to work with an HFSP team (UC Berkeley, Univ of Maryland, and Univ of Tübingen) that is investigating population…



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, MI…



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 of…



OpenMV – Fast and easy machine vision

OpenMV is an open source machine vision system. It’s designed to be easy-to-use, with a gentle learning curve. They want this to be the “Arduino of Machine Vision”. The software IDE is free…



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 an…



Pre-preprint: blogging a project

SLAB is trying something new with one project in the lab. Prior to drafting a preprint, we’re blogging the project and sharing the results and analysis. We invite anyone to comment on the…



Postdoc position with Duguid in Edinburgh

A world-class in vivo patch clamp electrophysiologist, Ian Duguid, is recruiting to his lab. Ian provides excellent training, and his lab is in a tremendous setting: Edinburgh. Ian’s also one of the…



Sanworks’ open source behavior devices and pulse generator

Sanworks has a whole series of devices for behavior experiments. Everything is open source and well documented. You can also pay them to assemble the devices if you choose.



3D printed fly holder

Peter Weir has a nice write up and directions on how to make the fly holder from his recent paper. He has some other useful notes that are worth checking out too: github, blog,…



ViRMEn – Virtual reality MATLAB engine

Dmitriy Aronov, while postdocing in David Tank’s lab at Princeton, developed a virtual reality engine that runs in MATLAB called ViRMEn. It’s open and there’s a good amount of documentation. The downloadable…



Calcium imaging analysis GUI for MATLAB

Stephan (currently in the Gilbert lab @ Rockefeller) wrote in to share his code for analyzing calcium signalling data in MATLAB. Thanks, Stephan!

Stephan writes…

I made a MATLAB GUI that automatically extracts ROIs from calcium imaging…



Cheap microcontrollers

This post is by Koen Vervaeke.

Cheap microcontrollers like Arduino or Raspberries are great devices to orchestrate behavior experiments. They don’t have however high voltage outputs to directly drive valves, servomotors, etc which typically require…



FlyMAD

This tip comes from John Stowers. He and his colleagues developed an open source opto- and thermo- genetic system for targeting freely moving Drosophila with lasers.

He wrote a long post discussing some of the…



Air hockey for mice

Mobile HomeCage is a different approach for awake, behaving experiments. It’s from Helsinki-based Neurotar.

Their marketing video is worth a viewing. You won’t regret it.