This Project Grant awarded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) under the Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders (CFDA 93.853) will provide $183,751 to the Regents of the University of Minnesota to engineer and deploy a miniaturized wide-field micro-camera array microscope (MCAM) capable of imaging a large area of the cerebellar cortex with cellular resolution in freely behaving mice.
The key objectives are to: 1) Design and build an MCAM compatible with a polymer skull implant to enable cellular-level imaging of Purkinje cell populations in the cerebellum of head-fixed mice; and 2) Iteratively refine the MCAM design to ensure robust motion and light artifact-free imaging in freely behaving mice, and validate its utility to measure cerebellar-wide Purkinje cell activity and encoding of error signals during ladder rung walking. This research aims to develop an innovative imaging approach to gain new insights into the fundamental neural mechanisms underlying cerebellar computations for both motor and non-motor functions.
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