Sensitive red protein calcium indicators for imaging neural activity

By H. Dana, Boaz Mohar, Yi Sun, Sujatha Narayan, A. Gordus, J. Hasseman, G. Tsegaye, Graham T. Holt, Amy Hu, D. Walpita and 9 more. bioRxiv, 2016

890 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Genetically encoded calcium indicators (GECIs) allow measurement of activity in large populations of neurons and in small neuronal compartments, over times of milliseconds to months. Although GFP-based GECIs are widely used for in vivo neurophysiology, GECIs with red-shifted excitation and emission spectra have advantages for in vivo imaging because of reduced scattering and absorption in tissue, and a consequent reduction in phototoxicity. However, current red GECIs are inferior to the state-of-the-art GFP-based GCaMP6 indicators for detecting and quantifying neural activity. Here we present improved red GECIs based on mRuby (jRCaMP1a, b) and mApple (jRGECO1a), with sensitivity comparable to GCaMP6. We characterized the performance of the new red GECIs in cultured neurons and in mouse, Drosophila, zebrafish and C. elegans in vivo. Red GECIs facilitate deep-tissue imaging, dual-color imaging together with GFP-based reporters, and the use of optogenetics in combination with calcium imaging.

Subfields: Biophysics, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0758febdc314ac4cd0200cc060c97bd4b35706d6

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Citations in the corpus

Functional Imaging of Dentate Granule Cells in the Adult Mouse Hippocampus (2016, neutral): “Red fluorescent indicators, of which new variants have been introduced recently (Dana et al., 2016), are particularly suitable for facilitating deep tissue imaging.”
Ultrafast neuronal imaging of dopamine dynamics with designed genetically encoded sensors (2018, methodology): “To link the DA release to local neuronal activity, we performed dual-color measurements with dLight1 and the red-shifted calcium indicator jRGECO1a (31) in lateral core/shell regions (Fig.”
The growing and glowing toolbox of fluorescent and photoactive proteins (2016, background): “, the R-GECO1-derived R-CaMP2 [109] and the GENIE project’s jRCaMP1a,b and jRGECO1a variants [110]) offering performance that approaches that of GCaMP6.”
A genetically-encoded fluorescent sensor enables rapid and specific detection of dopamine in flies, fish, and mice (2018, positive): “UAS-jRCaMP1a (BDSC: 63792) (Dana et al., 2016), a gift from Chuan Zhou, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.”