Sensory stimuli, including auditory, visual, or tactile inputs, can elicit varied brain and bodily responses contingent upon their novelty and salience levels. Human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have delineated brain regions involved in salience detection, suggesting a feedforward propagation of brain activity from sensory to associative areas. Longstanding theories have emphasized the significance of the Locus Coeruleus – Norepinephrine (LC/NE) system in governing the levels of salience in sensory signals. However, causal evidence linking LC activity to alterations in stimulus response at the brain network level is currently lacking. A common paradigm to study the novelty/salience value of a stimulus is the oddball task, where infrequent target stimuli (oddballs) are embedded in a sequence of frequent, non-target stimuli (standards). This study introduces a novel experimental methodology integrating awake functional MRI in a rat model with an oddball sensory task alongside concurrent LC optogenetic modulation. We employ both a conventional EPI and a novel Zero Echo Time (ZTE) sequence known as SORDINO. The SORDINO sequence offers blood volume-sensitive contrast while significantly reducing MRI acoustic noise, thereby enhancing overall animal comfort during scanning. Initial observations indicate successful habituation of animals to the scanner environment with minimal motion artifacts. Additionally, robust BOLD activity in sensory areas was observed through the implementation of sensory stimulation paradigms using a block design.Experiments performing concurrent optogenetic activation of the LC paired with sensory stimuli are ongoing and preliminary results point towards changes in activity in both sensory and frontal areas, underscoring its role in attentional processing.