Enny van Beest

Title:

Tracking neurons across days with high temporal resolution

Abstract:

Many fundamental questions in systems neuroscience, such as those related to memory, learning, and aging, involve neural activity spanning multiple brain areas and time scales. Neural activity from milliseconds to months across the brain can be recorded with chronically implanted high-density arrays such as Neuropixels probes, which measure each spike at tens of sites and record hundreds of neurons. In this talk, I will present the tools we developed to record and track neurons across days with high temporal resolution, and give examples of scientific questions we can answer using these tools.

First, I will introduce the reusable implant for chronic Neuropixels probes we developed to conduct such recordings across months (Bimbard et al., eLife 2024). These recordings produce vast amounts of data that require new approaches for tracking neurons across recordings. To meet this need, we developed UnitMatch, a pipeline that operates after spike sorting, based only on each unit’s spike waveform (van Beest et al., Nature Methods 2024). Then, I will highlight how we validated UnitMatch using neurons’ remarkably stable functional activity patterns in recordings from the mouse brain across weeks to months. Finally, I will show some examples of how we can use UnitMatch to reveal plasticity in neural activity across days.