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Updated: Dec 17, 2025
Functional Calcium Imaging in Developing Cortical Networks
Published on: October 22, 2011
Precision Calcium Imaging of Dense Neural Populations via a Cell-Body-Targeted Calcium Indicator
Or A Shemesh1, Changyang Linghu2, Kiryl D Piatkevich3
1The MIT Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA; Department of Biological Engineering, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA; MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA; Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA; MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA; Department of Neurobiology and Pittsburgh Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Abstract:
Methods for one-photon fluorescent imaging of calcium dynamics can capture the activity of hundreds of neurons across large fields of view at a low equipment complexity and cost. In contrast to two-photon methods, however, one-photon methods suffer from higher levels of crosstalk from neuropil, resulting in a decreased signal-to-noise ratio and artifactual correlations of neural activity. We address this problem by engineering cell-body-targeted variants of the fluorescent calcium indicators GCaMP6f and GCaMP7f. We screened fusions of GCaMP to natural, as well as artificial, peptides and identified fusions that localized GCaMP to within 50 μm of the cell body of neurons in mice and larval zebrafish. One-photon imaging of soma-targeted GCaMP in dense neural circuits reported fewer artifactual spikes from neuropil, an increased signal-to-noise ratio, and decreased artifactual correlation across neurons. Thus, soma-targeting of fluorescent calcium indicators facilitates usage of simple, powerful, one-photon methods for imaging neural calcium dynamics.
