Visual stimulator with customizable light spectra

Katrin Franke, Andre Maia Chagas and colleagues have developed and shared a spatial visual stimulator with an arbitrary-spectrum of light for visual neuroscientists.

Vision research, quite obviously, relies on control of visual stimuli in an experiment. There are a great number of commercially available devices and hardware that are implemented in presenting visual stimuli to human and other species, however, these devices are predominantly developed for the visual spectrum of humans. For other species, such as drosophila, zebrafish, and rodents, their visual spectrum includes UV, and the devices used in studies sometimes fail to present this range of stimulus, and therefore often limits our understanding of the visual systems of other organisms. To address this, Franke, Chagas and colleagues developed an open source, generally low cost visual stimulator which can be customized with up to 6 chromatic channels. Given the components used to build the device, the spectrum of light can be arbitrary and customizable to be adapted to different animal models based on their visual spectrum. The details of this device, including the parts list and information for a custom python library for generating visual stimuli (QDSpy), can be found in the eLife publication. The device is tested and shown to work with stimulating the mouse retina and in vivo zebrafish studies; details on these experiments can also be found in the publication.

 This research tool was created by your colleagues. Please acknowledge the Principal Investigator, cite the article in which the tool was described, and include an RRID in the Materials and Methods of your future publications. RRID:SCR_021545