Topic: Light Beads Microscope

Information from rich visual signals and ongoing behavioral variables simultaneously drive the same neurons in the cortex without corrupting each other (Niell et al. 2010, Stringer et al. 2019, Shimaoka et al. 2019). How does the anatomical organization of the cortex support the joint coding of these streams of information? We hypothesized that stimulus-driven and non-stimulus activity follow different anatomical organizations in the visual cortex. To investigate the physical distribution of these signals, we used the Light Beads Microscope (LBM, Demas et al. 2021) to volumetrically image the

Introduction: Spontaneous activity in visual cortex is high-dimensional and state-dependent, yet its organizing principles are unclear (Stringer et al. Science 2019; Berkes et al. Science 2011). We combine large-scale imaging, modelling, and theory to ask: 1. Does spontaneous activity share the structure of evoked activity? 2. Is spontaneous activity organized spatially? Methods: We constructed a modified Light Beads Microscope (Demas et al. Nature Methods 2021) to image Ca2+ transients in excitatory neurons from large volumes. We developed an open-source, GPU-accelerated volumetric cell extra