Analyzing Circuits With Extracellular Recording and Optogenetics

Material below is adapted from the SfN Short Course Local Circuit Analysis With Integrated Large-Scale Recording of Neuronal Activity and Optogenics, by György Buzsáki, PhD. Short Courses are daylong scientific trainings on emerging neuroscience topics and research techniques held the day before SfN’s annual meeting.

Understanding all the parts of a neuronal circuit will ultimately help explain how the circuit — and the brain — gives rise to behavior. To investigate how a circuit functions, different types of neurons spread across the brain need to be monitored simultaneously, and the contribution of each neuron determined. This requires hardware capable of recording many individual neurons, methods to separate spikes, and a way to identify different neuronal types.