Improving focal photostimulation of cortical neurons with pre-derived wavefront correction

Date

2017

Authors

Choy, Julian
Sane, Sharmila
Lee, W. M. Steve
Stricker, Christian
Bachor, Hans
Daria, Vincent

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Frontiers Research Foundation

Abstract

Recent progress in neuroscience to image and investigate brain function has been made possible by impressive developments in optogenetic and opto-molecular tools. Such research requires advances in optical techniques for the delivery of light through brain tissue with high spatial resolution. The tissue causes distortions to the wavefront of the incoming light which broadens the focus and consequently reduces the intensity and degrades the resolution. Such effects are detrimental in techniques requiring focal stimulation. Adaptive wavefront correction has been demonstrated to compensate for these distortions. However, iterative derivation of the corrective wavefront introduces time constraints that limit its applicability to probe living cells. Here, we demonstrate that we can pre-determine and generalize a small set of Zernike modes to correct for aberrations of the light propagating through specific brain regions. A priori identification of a corrective wavefront is a direct and fast technique that improves the quality of the focus without the need for iterative adaptive wavefront correction. We verify our technique by measuring the efficiency of two-photon photolysis of caged neurotransmitters along the dendrites of a whole-cell patched neuron. Our results show that encoding the selected Zernike modes on the excitation ight can improve light propagation through brain slices of rats as observed by the neuron’s evoked excitatory post-synaptic potential in response to localized focal uncaging at the spines of the neuron’s dendrites.

Description

Keywords

adaptive optics, two photon microscopy, spatial light modulator, two-photon photolysis

Citation

Source

Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience

Type

Journal article

Book Title

Entity type

Access Statement

Open Access

License Rights

Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY)

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