Brain-wide neuronal dynamics during motor adaptation in zebrafish

By Misha B. Ahrens, Jennifer M. Li, M. Orger, D. Robson, A. Schier, F. Engert, R. Portugues. Nature, 2012

701 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A fundamental question in neuroscience is how entire neural circuits generate behaviour and adapt it to changes in sensory feedback. Here we use two-photon calcium imaging to record the activity of large populations of neurons at the cellular level, throughout the brain of larval zebrafish expressing a genetically encoded calcium sensor, while the paralysed animals interact fictively with a virtual environment and rapidly adapt their motor output to changes in visual feedback. We decompose the network dynamics involved in adaptive locomotion into four types of neuronal response properties, and provide anatomical maps of the corresponding sites. A subset of these signals occurred during behavioural adjustments and are candidates for the functional elements that drive motor learning. Lesions to the inferior olive indicate a specific functional role for olivocerebellar circuitry in adaptive locomotion. This study enables the analysis of brain-wide dynamics at single-cell resolution during behaviour.

Subfields: Cell Biology, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c65a87b3b0c56bd2ccea86a886a1e51c3f384ec6

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Citations in the corpus

Mapping of brain activity by automated volume analysis of immediate early genes (2016, positive): “Optical techniques, coupled with GCaMP calcium probes, provide live recording of neuronal activity over larger volumes, including activity of most neurons in Zebra fish larva brain (Ahrens et al., 2012), and several thousand neurons in the mouse cortex (Peron et al., 2015).”
Inferring brain-computational mechanisms with models of activity measurements (2016, background): “B 371: 20160278. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0278 Accepted: 19 July 2016 One contribution of 15 to a Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Interpreting BOLD: a dialogue between cognitive and cellular neuroscience’.”
On simplicity and complexity in the brave new world of large-scale neuroscience. (2015, background): “Experimental neuroscience is entering a golden age marked by the advent of remarkable new methods enabling us to record ever increasing numbers of neurons [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], and measure brain connectivity at various levels of resolution [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14], sometimes measuring both connec”
Whole-brain activity mapping onto a zebrafish brain atlas (2015, methodology): “The anesthetic was removed and fish were imaged in a single plane at 2Hz using a custom 2-photon microscope 29,67 , while presenting forward-moving gratings to activate neurons in the hindbrain.”
Computational neuroethology: a call to action (2019, background): “Investigations of whole-brain activity during fictive locomotion in zebrafish have been crucial for mapping and identifying the functional roles of new brain areas, including those for motor adaptation learning (Ahrens et al., 2012) and turning behavior (Dunn et al.”
Attractor and integrator networks in the brain (2021, background): “Innovations in recording methods that made it possible to record multiple neurons simultaneously in animals performing naturalistic behaviors [ 96, 97, 98, 99 ] , have enabled essential tests of these state-space predictions of attractor models.”
Dimensionality reduction for large-scale neural recordings (2014, background): “A telling example comes from optical recordings throughout the entire brain of a larval zebrafish at cellular resolution during motor adaptation 50 .”