Equipment Reviews

To summarise this relevant blog post, I estimated effective stimulation depth of the most popular in vivo optogenetics LED’s against a range of commonly-used opsins:

Effective stimulation depth for optogenetics LED's for a range of common opsins.
Effective stimulation depth (mm) in “mixed” brain matter

Testing opto systems

1. Plexbright LED’s on commutator

ProsCons
Decent power from blue LED (7.5 mW)Non-blue LED’s are not bright enough
Optic fibres are very “soft”, which limits behavioural impact to animalCommutators are heavy, which drags on the mice, and the fibres are very fragile
Comes as “complete” system for basic opto stimsThe optogenetic controller doesn’t have easy TTL input, so is difficult to use with anything other than Plexon’s software

2. Prizmatix ultra-bright LED

ProsCons
Good power from blue LED (10 mW)Non-blue LED’s are not bright enough
Rotary optical connections spin very easilyOptic fibres are very stiff which impact the animal
LED accepts easy TTL input

%d bloggers like this: