Miniscope Assembly Training
I have recently attended a miniscope assembly training offered by Gardner lab. It was a really exciting experience. I would like to thank our instructors Dan Leman and William Yen for organizing this training.
The miniscope is a tiny imaging system that can be implanted on the skull of freely behaving animals. It allows in-vivo non-invasive monitoring of neural activity over months. System is developed by BU former graduate student William Liberti (currently a post-doctoral fellow at UC, Berkeley) and is a single-photon fluorescent imaging system made of a combination of readily available and 3-D-printed parts. The miniscope has been adapted to fit rodents and other types of birds. The project’s stated goal is “to produce a customizable and scaleable single-photon fluorescent imaging microscope system that takes advantage of developing open-source analysis platforms.” You can access the details of the project at Finchscope and Github pages.
Assembly process mainly consists of two parts: (1) taking a 3-D printed miniscope body and placing the optical elements inside (filters, dichroic and lenses), (2) making the electrical connections (by soldering) for the data acquisition and LED lighting. Although these steps require a little practice, Dan and Will are great instructors to lead you on the right path. The surprise gift of this training is you get to walk away with the microscope you have just built.
Kıvılcım Kılıç, MD PhD
BU Neurophotonics Center
