This 5 days course will provide advanced knowledge and training in the usage of miniscopes for imaging rodent neuronal activity in freely-moving behaving animals.

Miniscope is an open-source miniature 1-photon fluorescence microscope designed in the labs of Professor Alcino Silva and Dr. Peyman Golshani (UCLA). Miniscope can be head-mounted even on a small freely-moving animal and used for imaging activity of large number (hundreds) of neurons in deep regions of the brain via miniature lens. We'd like to help researchers in Portugal and Europe to be able to use this inexpensive yet powerful neuroscience tool.

Our Miniscope Workshop in Braga will be given by Miniscope developers group from UCLA and will allow a large number (up to 30 people) of students and postdocs to get comprehensive training on the methodology (assembly of the devices, implantation, acquisition and analysis of the data), as well as to form a network for future collaborative usage and further development of Miniscope methodology. The design of hardware and software is en par with commercial counterpart, but is made open-source to the research community via the website miniscope.org.