1. Fully autonomous mouse behavioral and optogenetic experiments in home-cage
- Author
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Nuo Li, Alyse M. Thomas, and Yaoyao Hao
- Subjects
Male ,0301 basic medicine ,Superior Colliculi ,QH301-705.5 ,Computer science ,striatum ,Science ,Decision Making ,Striatum ,Optogenetics ,superior colliculus ,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology ,Mice ,03 medical and health sciences ,Neural activity ,0302 clinical medicine ,Cortex (anatomy) ,Task Performance and Analysis ,medicine ,Animals ,Learning ,Operant conditioning ,Biology (General) ,Cerebral Cortex ,General Immunology and Microbiology ,General Neuroscience ,Superior colliculus ,automated training ,Brain ,decision-making ,General Medicine ,Cortex (botany) ,Neostriatum ,cortex ,030104 developmental biology ,medicine.anatomical_structure ,Medicine ,Home cage ,Female ,Neuroscience ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery - Abstract
SummaryGoal-directed behaviors involve distributed brain networks. The small size of the mouse brain makes it amenable to manipulations of neural activity dispersed across brain areas, but existing optogenetic methods serially test a few brain regions at a time, which slows comprehensive mapping of distributed networks. Laborious operant conditioning training required for most experimental paradigms exacerbates this bottleneck. We present an autonomous workflow to survey the involvement of brain regions at scale during operant behaviors in mice. Naïve mice living in a home-cage system learned voluntary head-fixation (>1 hour/day) and performed difficult decision-making tasks, including contingency reversals, for 2 months without human supervision. We incorporated an optogenetic approach to manipulate activity in deep brain regions through intact skull during home-cage behavior. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, we tested dozens of mice in parallel unsupervised optogenetic experiments, revealing multiple regions in cortex, striatum, and superior colliculus involved in tactile decision-making.
- Published
- 2021
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