A wide field-of-view multi-area two-photon microscope for simultaneous imaging of sensory and motor cortex in the mouse brain

Sensorimotor processing is essential to the survival of all organisms, as they take in and act on information from their surroundings. Because of the similarities between the cortices of mice and humans, studying sensorimotor processing in mice can tell us more about the same processes in humans. Unfortunately, the distance between sensory and motor cortex in mice is ~4.7 mm which has prevented recording from both areas simultaneously using conventional two-photon microscopes. Here, we developed a novel two-photon microscope to enable the investigation of information transfer between somatosensory and motor cortex in mice by combining custom designed and commercial optics to overcome these field-of-view limitations. Additionally, we enabled imaging of four regions of interest simultaneously by using spatiotemporal multiplexing. Subsequently, we investigated sensorimotor processing during a whisker based behavioral task by making use of the novel microscope. We probed neural activity from sensory and motor cortex using a genetically encoded calcium indicator and labeled neurons which project from somatosensory to motor cortex and vice versa using retrograde tracing. By combining these two approaches we were able to study the communication of information between somatosensory and motor cortex. Overall, this work provides a new technique to record from multiple in vivo regions of interest simultaneously at a large separation distance, enabling novel experiments and findings.

Author dc:creator

• Clough, Mitchell

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Chen, Jerry L.

• Biomedical engineering

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2144/46640

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.bu.edu:2144/46640