Open Hardware seminars

Due to the unsuitability of benchtop imaging for tasks that require unrestrained movement, investigators have tried, for almost two decades, to develop miniature 2P microscopes-2P miniscopes–that can be carried on the head of freely moving animals. In this talk, I would first briefly review the development history of this technique, and then report our latest progress on developing the new generation of 2P miniscopes, MINI2P, that overcomes the limits of previous versions by both meeting requirements for fatigue-free exploratory behavior during extended recording periods and satisfying demands for further increasing the cell yield by an order of magnitude, to thousands of neurons. The performance and reliability of MINI2P are validated by recordings of spatially tuned neurons in three brain regions and in three behavioral assays. All information about MINI2P is open access, with instruction videos, code, and manuals on public repositories, and workshops will be organized to help new users getting started. MINI2P permits large-scale and high-resolution calcium imaging in freely-moving mice, and opens the door to investigating brain functions during unconstrained natural behaviors.

The Open Science movement advocates for more transparent, equitable and reliable science. It focusses on improving existing infrastructures and spans all aspects of the scientific process, from implementing systems that reward pre-registering studies and guarantee their publication, all the way to making research data citable and freely available. In this context, open source tools (and the development ethos supporting them) are becoming more and more present in academic labs, as researchers are realizing that they can improve the quality of their work, while cutting costs. In this talk an overview of OS tools for neuroscience will be given, with a focus on software and hardware, and how their use can bring scientific independence and make research evolve faster.