September 3, 2020 Andres de Groot and colleagues from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience have created a lightweight, versatile miniscope for fluorescence imaging and optogenetic stimulation. Miniaturized fluorescent microscopes (miniscopes) are powerful tools used for the monitoring of neural signals during unrestrained behavior. NINscope is a compact miniscope that has an integrated inertial measurement sensor […]
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An Open Source Syringe Pump Controller for Fluid Delivery of Multiple Volumes
August 20, 2020 Linda Amarante and colleagues from American University have developed and shared an open-source syringe pump controller for dispensing precise volumes of fluid over precise timescales. Delivering rewards are a crucial part of behavioral neuroscience experiments. In the case of liquid rewards, such as water, juice, chocolate milk or sucrose solutions, syringe pumps […]
CerebraLux
June 25, 2020 This week we want to shed some light on a project from Robel Dagnew and colleagues from UCLA called CerebraLux, a wireless system for optogenetic stimulation. Optogenetic methods have been a crucial tool for understanding the role that certain neural cell populations have in modulating or maintaining a variety of behaviors. This […]
Rodent Arena Tracker (RAT)
June 18, 2020 Jonathan Krynitsky and colleagues from the Kravitz lab at Washington University have constructed and shared RAT, a closed loop system for machine vision rodent tracking and task control. The Rodent Arena Tracker, or RAT, is a low cost wireless position tracker for automatically tracking mice in high contrast arenas. The device can […]
Visual stimulator with customizable light spectra
May 7, 2020 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 […]
neurotic
April 30, 2020 Jeffrey P. Gill and colleagues have developed and shared a new toolbox for synchronizing video and neural signals, cleverly named neurotic! Collecting neural data and behavioral data are fundamental to behavioral neuroscience, and the ability to synchronize these data streams are just as important as collecting the information in the first place. […]
3DOC: 3D Operant Conditioning
April 23, 2020 Raffaele Mazziotti from the Istituto di Neuroscienze CNR di Pisa has generously shared the following about 3DOC, a recently developed and published project from their team. “Operant conditioning is a classical paradigm and a standard technique used in experimental psychology in which animals learn to perform an action in order to achieve […]
PASTA
April 16, 2020 Thanks to Jan Homolak from the Department of Pharmacology, University of Zagreb School of Medicine, Zagreb, Croatia for sharing the following about repurposing a digital kitchen scale for neuroscience research: a complete hardware and software cookbook for PASTA (Platform for Acoustic STArtle). “As we were starving for a solution on how to […]
Toolboxes for Spike and LFP Analysis
April 9, 2020 There are a number of open source toolboxes available for neural data analysis, especially for spike and local field potential data. With more options comes a more difficult decision when it comes to selecting the toolbox that’s right for your data. Fortunately, Valentina Unakafova and Alexander Gail have compared several toolboxes for […]
Open Source Whisking Video Database
April 2, 2020 Alireza Azafar and colleagues at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour at Rabound University have published an open source database of high speed videos of whisking behavior in freely moving rodents. As responsible citizens, it’s possible you are missing lab and working from home. Maybe you have plenty to do, […]