Opsin Selection for Zebrafish Circuit Control
You can have a beautiful transgenic line, a healthy clutch, and a perfectly aligned light path—and still get the wrong behavior because the opsin is doing something rather different from what its label…
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Sci-art collaborations: before and after outreach impact
A science-art exhibit can close the baseline interest gap between STEM and non-STEM adults in a single visit. That…
Zebrafish behavior tracking: 4 open-source software tools
A zebrafish behavior assay can produce thousands of frames in a single session, but raw video is not yet a measurement…
Taste and smell integration: a zebrafish mapping project
Your larval zebrafish are swimming, the stimulus streams look beautifully separated, and the tracking software is…
Spinal cord circuit mapping in larval zebrafish
You have a spinal cord roughly 300 microns wide. It contains hundreds of interneuron subtypes making thousands of…
Neural data to MIDI: fast audio conversion for sci-art
Neural data does not arrive in a form that music can immediately understand. An EEG trace is a changing voltage…
Zebrafish immobilization: choosing the right imaging method
Your calcium movie looks clean until you ask the uncomfortable question: are those neural signals from the larva, or…
Odorant perception pathways: neural shifts before and after
A single odorant molecule contacting an olfactory sensory neuron does not enter a clean relay. It enters a sequence of…
Neuronal migration: 4 live-imaging methods for zebrafish
Neuronal migration is not a quiet relocation from one point in the brain to another. It is a sequence of decisions made…
Brain wave music: a step-by-step production workflow
A brain wave music project usually fails before the first note plays. The headset loses contact, the signal fills with…
Zebrafish brain registration: a guide to Z-Brain mapping
A confocal stack can look perfect and still be analytically unusable. Fluorescent reporters are firing across the optic…
Ectopic olfactory receptor screening: a fast RT-qPCR setup
Detecting olfactory receptors outside the olfactory epithelium is less like finding a bright signal than like…
Axon guidance assays: choosing the right setup for your lab
You're staring down the scope at a perfectly prepped stripe assay — alternating lanes of netrin-1 and BSA, your…
Neuroscience art: how interactive media shifts perception
A 22% drop in salivary cortisol. A 30% reduction in interleukin-6. A 28% decline in TNF-alpha. These are not…
Neural activity sonification: 4 ways to translate brain data
Brain data has a shape problem. The electrical chatter of neurons — the slow drift of cortical oscillations, the crisp…
Zebrafish GCaMP Lines: Choosing the Best Fit for Your Lab
You can have a beautiful zebrafish brain movie, a stable preparation, and a perfectly healthy-looking larva—and still…
Trigeminal receptor signaling: changes after capsaicin
A single bolus of capsaicin injected into deep craniofacial tissue drops the mechanical activation threshold of…
Habenulo-interpeduncular pathway: 4 mapping methods
The habenulo-interpeduncular pathway is a compact tract with an unusually large interpretive burden. In zebrafish, the…
Light-sheet zebrafish imaging: from mounting to data
A light-sheet zebrafish brain protocol can fail before the microscope ever starts collecting data. The usual culprit is…
Zebrafish chemosensory assays: a dual-stimulus setup
A larval zebrafish can discriminate between two chemical cues delivered 100 µm apart—across paired nasal cavities…
Sonified neural data: how it changes audience engagement
A range of 80 to 97 percent. That is the decline in insect populations represented by a prominent ecological…
Zebrafish brain imaging: 5 ways to prevent motion artifacts
During a fast volumetric calcium scan, a larval zebrafish twitches — a reflex adjustment, a momentary flex in a quiet…
Zebrafish olfactory mapping: from preparation to final data
You've pulled the fish out of the tank, you've pipetted what should be a perfect bolus of indicator into the naris…
Zebrafish Optogenetic Mapping: A Step-by-Step Lab Protocol
You can record calcium activity across the entire larval brain. That part is solved. The harder problem is assigning…