Fully autonomous mouse behavioral and optogenetic experiments in home-cage

Goal-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 distrib...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:eLife 2021-05, Vol.10
Main Authors: Hao, Yaoyao, Thomas, Alyse Marian, Li, Nuo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal experimentation
automated training
Automation
Behavior
Brain
cortex
Decision making
Experiments
Mice
Neostriatum
Neuroscience
Operant conditioning
optogenetics
Scott, Ben
striatum
Superior colliculus
Tools and Resources
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Goal-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. Naive mice living in a home-cage system learned voluntary head-fixation (>1 hr/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.
ISSN:2050-084X
2050-084X
DOI:10.7554/elife.66112