Topic: whole-brain calcium imaging

Characterizing the relationship between neural population activity and behavioral data is a central goal of neuroscience. While latent variable models (LVMs) are successful in describing high dimensional data, they are typically only designed for a single type of data, making it difficult to identify structure shared across different experimental data modalities. Here, we address this shortcoming by proposing an LVM which extracts shared and independent latents for distinct, simultaneously recorded experimental modalities. We do this by combining Gaussian Process Factor Analysis (GPFA), an int

To survive, animals must respond appropriately to changing external conditions. To do so quickly, animals use their past experiences to inform future actions. However, how past experience modulate information processing which ultimately influence behavior is still not well understood. Here we addressed this question by investigating how larval zebrafish use past action-outcome relationships to influence future responses to stimuli at the perceptual and behavioral levels. Fish were first made to adapt to changing locomotor efficacy, the difficulty of translating oneself through space. Fish inc

Nascent animals are most in need of learning to identify predators due to their vulnerability, yet paradoxically, are generally assumed not to be capable of such rapid, complex learning tasks. Here, a robotic fish-attacker interaction assay showed that larval zebrafish just a week of age learn to identify and avoid a robot following brief minutes-long periods of chase. Whole-brain calcium imaging identified noradrenergic signaling, consistent with a reinforcement signal, that was coupled to activity in populations spread across the larval pallium, subpallium, and habenula. Finally, targeted ne

Understanding the structural and functional network architectures of nervous systems has been a key focus of neuroscience. Many features of brain-wide neuronal networks have been identified in mammals using noninvasive methods that lack cellular information. Here, we performed whole-brain calcium imaging in zebrafish larvae to investigate the structural and genetic basis of functional connectivity (FC) at single-cell resolution. Neural activity from $\sim$50,000 neurons was recorded in head-restrained transgenic larvae expressing a pan-neuronal calcium sensor, while monitoring their tail movem