Cortex-wide imaging in naturally behaving mice with 1-gram wireless mesoscopes.

Wireless mesoscope Airscope achieves 4 μm resolution over a 6 mm field of view at 12.5 Hz in freely moving mice, enabling large-scale cortical imaging.

• Why it matters: Understanding how distributed cortical circuits coordinate behavior in natural settings is limited by current imaging tools that are tethered, low throughput, and have restricted fields of view, hindering studies of complex behaviors.
• What they did: Researchers developed Airscope, a 1.0-gram wireless mesoscope with a novel aspheric-lens design, supporting calcium imaging from over 8,500 neurons and paired with behavior analysis, across diverse behavioral paradigms and multiple animals.
• The result: Airscope reveals cortical activity patterns linked to social dominance, reward location, and brain-spinal interactions, demonstrating its potential to facilitate naturalistic, multi-animal neural recordings in systems neuroscience.