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Explore groundbreaking neuroscience research in this 29-minute webinar presented by Dr. Alison Hanson, MD, PhD, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Psychiatry Department at Columbia University. Discover how researchers are developing cutting-edge tools to automatically track and extract calcium signals from individual neurons in the cnidarian Hydra vulgaris, bringing the field closer to the holy grail of recording every spike from every neuron in a behaving animal. Learn about the collaborative effort that created an end-to-end pipeline using dually labeled transgenic Hydra with nuclear tdTomato and cytoplasmic GCaMP7s markers. Understand the open-source Python platform TraSE-IN (Tracking and Spike Estimation of Individual Neurons) that comprises modules for segmenting and tracking each nucleus over time while extracting corresponding calcium activity in the GCaMP channel. Examine the signal processing modules that enable robust prediction of individual spikes from each neuron's calcium signal, facilitating automatic generation and analysis of large-scale datasets of single-cell resolution neural activity. Gain insights into Dr. Hanson's research focus on spontaneous ultraslow frequency neural oscillations and their potential role as organizers of global neural activity and behavior in one of the simplest known nervous systems. This presentation offers valuable perspectives for neuroscientists, researchers, and students interested in neural monitoring technologies, model organism research, and the development of tools for understanding neural codes at the whole-animal level.
