The McGill‐Mouse‐Miniscope platform: A standardized approach for high‐throughput imaging of neuronal dynamics during behavior

Abstract

Understanding the rules that govern neuronal dynamics throughout the brain to subserve behavior and cognition remains one of the biggest challenges in neuroscience research. Recent technical advances enable the recording of increasingly larger neuronal populations to produce increasingly more sophisticated datasets. Despite bold and important open‐science and data‐sharing policies, these datasets tend to include unique data acquisition methods, behaviors, and file structures. Discrepancies between experimental protocols present key challenges in comparing data between laboratories and across different brain regions and species. Here, we discuss our recent efforts to create a standardized and high‐throughput research platform to address these issues. The McGill‐Mouse‐Miniscope (M3) platform is an initiative to combine miniscope calcium imaging with standardized touchscreen‐based animal behavioral testing. The goal is to curate an open‐source and standardized framework for acquiring, analyzing, and accessing high‐quality data of the neuronal dynamics that underly cognition throughout the brain in mice, marmosets, and models of disease. We end with a discussion of future developments and a call for users to adopt this standardized approach.

Circuit Investigation of Social Interaction and Substance Use Disorder Using Miniscopes

“…The advent of deep learning algorithms to track animal behavior has helped better align neural activity with behavior in individual and groups of animals, which is important for the study of SI and SUD. For example, behavior can be analyzed using deep learning software ( Hong et al, 2015 ; Mathis et al, 2018 ; Mosser et al, 2021 ) such as DeepLabCut ( Mathis et al, 2018 ; Nath et al, 2019 ; Table 1 ). Dual color miniscopes can record from two cell types simultaneously within the same animal, which provides a powerful tool to uncover spatiotemporal dynamics of activity in multiple cell subpopulations that are active during SI and in SUD ( Jacob et al, 2018 ; Leman et al, 2018 ; Figure 1 ).…”

“…Wire-free miniscopes have also been developed ( Barbera et al, 2019 ; Shuman et al, 2020 ) which can allow for study of SI in larger groups that would otherwise tangle and destroy wired systems. Moreover, advancements in behavior analysis ( Hong et al, 2015 ; Mosser et al, 2021 ) enable neural activity imaged with miniscopes to be correlated with discrete phases of behavior. Studying the emergence of how specific subtypes of neurons encode various components of behavioral sequences of SI and SUD is critical to understanding overlapping neurobiology and to preventing drug relapse.…”

New frontiers in translational research: Touchscreens, open science, and the mouse translational research accelerator platform

“…In addition to our previous research and that currently being undertaken at Western, we have also begun an exciting partnership with researchers at McGill University to unite neuroscience researchers across these institutions as part of a broader global initiative (Circuits to Cognition; C2C) aimed at illuminating the neural mechanisms of cognition and accelerating forward translational research. MouseTRAP and a complementary touchscreen‐based Open Science platform at McGill, the McGill‐Mouse‐Miniscope (M3) Platform, also described in this special issue 119 are core components of this initiative.…”

Touchscreen response technology and the power of stimulus‐based approaches in freely behaving animals

“…Some key advantages of touchscreen‐response methods in experimental animals include: face validity to human cognitive testing, high throughput automation, task flexibility (including wide spatial ranges of stimulus presentation), and compatibility with recording and imaging technology in rodents. Apropos to the important consideration of ethological validity in freely behaving animals, in this issue Mosser and colleagues 5 provide an open source and standardized framework for integrating miniscope technology and touchscreen responding in freely moving rodents. Increasingly, the availability of standardized tests and tools from the McGill‐Mouse‐Miniscope (M3) Platform, inspired by and adapted from the UCLA Miniscope project (http://www.miniscope.org), is making this integration more accessible to laboratories globally.…”