Skin suturing and cortical surface viral infusion improves imaging of neuronal ensemble activity with head-mounted miniature microscopes.

BACKGROUND: In vivo optical imaging of neural activity provides important insights into brain functions at the single-cell level. Cranial windows and virally delivered calcium indicators are commonly used for imaging cortical activity through two-photon microscopes in head-fixed animals. Recently, head-mounted one-photon microscopes have been developed for freely behaving animals. However, minimizing tissue damage from the virus injection procedure and maintaining window clarity for imaging can be technically challenging. NEW METHOD: We used a wide-diameter glass pipette at the cortical surface for infusing the viral calcium reporter AAV-GCaMP6 into the cortex. After infusion, the scalp skin over the implanted optical window was sutured to facilitate postoperative recovery. The sutured scalp was removed approximately two weeks later and a miniature microscope was attached above the window to image neuronal activity in freely moving mice. RESULTS: We found that cortical surface virus infusion efficiently labeled neurons in superficial layers, and scalp skin suturing helped to maintain the long-term clarity of optical windows. As a result, several hundred neurons could be recorded in freely moving animals. COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHODS: Compared to intracortical virus injection and open-scalp postoperative recovery, our methods minimized tissue damage and dura overgrowth underneath the optical window, and significantly increased the experimental success rate and the yield of identified neurons. CONCLUSION: Our improved cranial surgery technique allows for high-yield calcium imaging of cortical neurons with head-mounted microscopes in freely behaving animals. This technique may be beneficial for other optical applications such as two-photon microscopy, multi-site imaging, and optogenetic modulation.

In vivo two-photon imaging of experience-dependent molecular changes in cortical neurons.

The brain's ability to change in response to experience is essential for healthy brain function, and abnormalities in this process contribute to a variety of brain disorders. To better understand the mechanisms by which brain circuits react to an animal's experience requires the ability to monitor the experience-dependent molecular changes in a given set of neurons, over a prolonged period of time, in the live animal. While experience and associated neural activity is known to trigger gene expression changes in neurons most of the methods to detect such changes do not allow repeated observation of the same neurons over multiple days or do not have sufficient resolution to observe individual neurons. Here, we describe a method that combines in vivo two-photon microscopy with a genetically encoded fluorescent reporter to track experience-dependent gene expression changes in individual cortical neurons over the course of day-to-day experience. One of the well-established experience-dependent genes is Activity-regulated cytoskeletal associated protein (Arc). The transcription of Arc is rapidly and highly induced by intensified neuronal activity and its protein product regulates the endocytosis of glutamate receptors and long-term synaptic plasticity. The expression of Arc has been widely used as a molecular marker to map neuronal circuits involved in specific behaviors. In most of those studies, Arc expression was detected by in situ hybridization or immunohistochemistry in fixed brain sections. Although those methods revealed that the expression of Arc was localized to a subset of excitatory neurons after behavioral experience, how the cellular patterns of Arc expression might change with multiple episodes of repeated or distinctive experiences over days was not investigated. In vivo two-photon microscopy offers a powerful way to examine experience-dependent cellular changes in the living brain. To enable the examination of Arc expression in live neurons by two-photon microscopy, we previously generated a knock-in mouse line in which a GFP reporter is placed under the control of the endogenous Arc promoter. This protocol describes the surgical preparations and imaging procedures for tracking experience-dependent Arc-GFP expression patterns in neuronal ensembles in the live animal. In this method, chronic cranial windows were first implanted in Arc-GFP mice over the cortical regions of interest. Those animals were then repeatedly imaged by two-photon microscopy after desired behavioral paradigms over the course of several days. This method may be generally applicable to animals carrying other fluorescent reporters of experience-dependent molecular changes.