ALLEN INSTITUTE RESEARCHERS RELEASE LARGEST DATASET OF NEUROPIXELS RECORDINGS EVER COLLECTED
The new public dataset captures billions of electrical spikes from brains of mice trained to identify oddball photos
By Rachel Tompa, Ph.D. / Allen Institute
SEATTLE, Aug. 23, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- From 300,000 mouse neurons, scientists hope to glean how the brain drives behavior. A newly released publicly available dataset is the largest of its kind and represents billions of split-second electrical pulses that comprise the brain's language of information. From this massive collection of cellular activity, scientists hope to decode the neural computations that underlie behavior.
The new public dataset captures billions of electrical spikes from brains of mice trained to identify oddball photos
The dataset was collected using Neuropixels, ultra-thin silicon probes capable of measuring the activity of hundreds of neurons at once. Before the advent of such technologies, scientists could only eavesdrop on handfuls of single neurons at a time. It's like trying to deduce the rules of an unknown sports game by just watching one player, said Allen Institute neuroscientist Corbett Bennett, Ph.D., who was part of the team that led the creation of the dataset. People have discovered really valuable, interesting things with that method. But now that we can record from 1,000 neurons in every experiment, we're seeing so much more of the field, and we can determine a few more pieces of the rules of the game, Bennett said.
Mice were shown a series of images and trained to lick a spout when that series changedthe oddball image. As the animal performed its task, six Neuropixels probes recorded electrical chatter from more than a thousand neurons in action across several areas of the mouse's brain.
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