Miniscope V4

Founding developer Daniel Aharoni

Accessories for Miniscope V4
  • Miniscope V4 - Base Plate v2 (Pack of 10) - $350.00 USD (details)
  • Miniscope V4 - Base Plate v2 (Pack of 5) - $245.00 USD (details)
  • Miniscope V4 - Coaxial Cable Assembly - $195.00 USD (details)
  • Miniscope V4 - Hot Fix Flex PCB - $29.00 USD (details)

Founding developer Daniel Aharoni

With the sweeping success of the Miniscope family, Daniel Aharoni continues to develop neuro-behavioral recording techniques for freely behaving animals from his UCLA lab. The UCLA miniscope community maintains a WiKi to help disseminate this open source technology to the larger neuroscience community.


The V4 is a leap forward in miniscope technology. It will serve as the platform for a new generation of miniscopes for years to come. This high-end solution will help to advance and disseminate miniature microscopy to the fast increasing open-source neuroscience community.

Significant contributors to the V4 were also the Cai and Shuman labs at Mount Sinai, and the Blair lab at UCLA. It builds on the GolshaniSilva, and Khakh UCLA labs' initiative coordinated by Daniel Aharoni of making Mark Schnitzer's pioneering invention (Nature Methods 2011) open source. 

Miniscope V4 uses wide-field fluorescence imaging to record neural activity in awake, freely moving mice. The Varioptics electrowetting lens allows electronic focussing. V4 miniscopes from LabMaker come fully-assembled, tested, and ready to use. 

KEY FEATURES

  • >1mm diameter field of view
  • ~1mm working distance
  • with electronic focal adjustment of +/-200um with electrowetting lens; no more mechanical sliding in order to focus
  • all high resolution achromatic optics (no internal GRIN lens)
  • 2.6 grams, 22 mm tall
  • absolute head orientation sensor
  • requires ~1/5th the excitation power of previous systems
  • still uses only a single coaxial cable (down to 0.3mm in diameter) for power, communication, and data. 

CONTENTS 

  • Fully-assembled and tested Miniscope V4
  • Lens configuration 1
  • Corning (Varioptics) 2.5mm clear aperture electrowetting lens
  • aluminium objective sleeve for easy, repeated mounting (for base plate variant 2)
  • 2 separate base plate variant 2 with screws
  • 300 cm coaxial cable, 1 mm diameter, Hirose U.FL connector

FULFILLMENT

New orders can be shipped out in 6-8 weeks from the date of ordering.

USING A MINISCOPE

is straightforward when you follow the detailed UCLA step-by-step instructions. (requires prior registration with miniscope.org)

Experimental timeline (by Denise Cai)

PUBLICATION

Zhe Dong, William Mau, Yu (Susie) Feng, Zachary T. Pennington, Lingxuan Chen, Yosif Zaki, Kanaka Rajan, Tristan Shuman, Daniel Aharoni, Denise J. Cai (2021). Minian: An open-source miniscope analysis pipeline. BioRxiv.

Documentation Source Code Forum


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