{"id":668627,"date":"2026-10-29T07:26:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T07:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/668627\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T07:26:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T07:26:13","slug":"new-platform-enables-multimodal-recording-in-the-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/668627\/","title":{"rendered":"New platform enables multimodal recording in the wild"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new platform records neuronal activity and multiple behavioral measures, and includes optogenetic stimulation, enabling researchers to study the neuronal underpinnings of small animals\u2019 behavior in natural environments. Researchers describe the platform in a paper<\/a> published last month in Nature Methods.<\/p>\n

Previous efforts to record and manipulate neuronal activity in freely moving animals typically used tethers, which interfere with natural movement, especially in social settings involving multiple animals. Wireless devices exist, but these are usually heavy, which can also affect behavior, and they have limited battery life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most read <\/p>\n

\u201cOur dream was to bring neuroscientific studies closer to the natural behaviors animals express in the wild,\u201d says study investigator Antonio Fernandez-Ruiz<\/a>, associate professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University.<\/p>\n

The device, called WILD (Wireless, Interactive, Lightweight Datalogger), combines recording electrodes with multiple behavioral sensors (a head-mounted camera, a microphone and a motion-tracking unit) and an optogenetic stimulation module. Rather than transmitting neuronal data, the device includes onboard signal processing and a microSD card for storage. It also incorporates a microcontroller unit and Bluetooth wireless communication of control and synchronization signals.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat makes this impressive is the level of integration into a platform that can do multimodal recording, onboard processing and neuronal manipulation in a package that supports freely moving animals,\u201d says Daniel Aharoni<\/a>, associate professor-in-residence of neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the work. \u201cBringing these capabilities together makes experiments in complex environments and social settings much more practical.\u201d<\/p>\n

The platform weighs 4.7 grams, including a 1.65 gram battery and casing. A 2.5 gram battery would allow about three hours of continuous neuronal recording, using 64 channels and sampling at 20 kilohertz, but the device is highly configurable. \u201cYou can enable or disable any component or run it at a reduced sampling rate for longer, so it\u2019s easily tailored to different experiments,\u201d says study investigator Zifang Zhao<\/a>, a research associate in Fernandez-Ruiz\u2019s lab who led the engineering.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea was to enable a field of research at the intersection between neuroscience and ecology,\u201d says study investigator Azahara Oliva<\/a>, assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell. Previously, researchers could record brain activity while animals performed laboratory tasks, or behavior over longer time frames in nature. \u201cHere we can look at both,\u201d Oliva says. \u201cWe can see what animals do in the natural environment and correlate it with changes in light, temperature or the presence of predators.\u201d This opens up experiments investigating everything from the effect of seasons on the brain to the long-term impacts of psychedelic drugs, Fernandez-Ruiz says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new platform records neuronal activity and multiple behavioral measures, and includes optogenetic stimulation, enabling researchers to study…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":668628,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,80],"class_list":["post-668627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/668628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}