Final project proposal

My final project idea is a form of BCI where we couple the activity of a single neuron to reward. When the neuron fires, the mouse recieves a water reward. The goal is to test whether mice can learn to change or control the activity of a single neuron.

Figure 1 Single Neuron BCI Task (A) The activity of a single neuron in the primary forelimb motor cortex (MOp) is coupled to the lick spout via a transfer function f. The single neuron’s output activity will be reported in red, and the inputs from other neurons will be reported in green. (B) The presynaptic inputs to the BCI neuron will be imaged as the brain learns and transitions between different BCI transfer functions. The single neuron BCI is crucial to linking synaptic mechanisms to information encoding in neural circuits.

Vinyl cutting

First, I made a neuron vinyl cutout. To do this I searched for sillhouette images of neurons and downloaded the image. Then I imported it to Adobe Illustrator where I selected “outline as sillhouette” so that I could modify parameters such as the line thickness. This was important since I was miniaturizing the neuron sticker, I needed to make the lines thicker to print properly. Then I uploading a png to the mods app which was super user friendly. I made tons of stickers to give to my labmates and friends!

I chose to use this week to document my mouse behavior circuit and how I talk to my arduino :-)

I used the simulation to learn how to add a button to my circuit. Here when the button press is detected by the arduino it turns on the LED pin. In my case, the button should open the solenoid for a fixed amount of time determined by the code onboard the arduino uno. I already have a pin sending to signal pin of relay that opens solenoid, so instead of changing LED_PIN i will change the SOLENOID_PIN when the button is pressed to open solenoid valve.