Arm movements induced by noninvasive optogenetic stimulation of the motor cortex in the common marmoset

Abstract

SignificanceWhich brain area drives hand/arm movements after learning or brain injury? When does motor cortical activity generate appropriate hand/arm movements? To address these issues, it is necessary to manipulate motor cortical activity in a controlled manner. Optogenetic tools allow neuronal activity to be manipulated in a variety of animals, but forelimb movements in nonhuman primates have not previously been optogenetically induced or modulated. Here, we improved a method of optogenetic cortical stimulation and induced overt forelimb movements in the common marmoset, a New World monkey. Photostimulation also modulated voluntary forelimb movements, with the modulated movement trajectories depending on the stimulation site and timing. Our results open doors for noninvasive interrogation of motor circuits in behaving nonhuman primates.

FreiPose: A Deep Learning Framework for Precise Animal Motion Capture in 3D Spaces

“…rotational behavior, speed, mobile time, mobile episodes, and distance traveled [17,18]. Recently, effects on single body parts have also been started to be investigated via video analysis [19]. To systematically investigate the effect of optogenetic stimulation in freely moving rats, we recorded the movements of three animals in four sessions, two sessions with 30 Hz laser burst frequency and two sessions with 10 Hz with a stimulation duration of 5 sec, 10% duty cycle.…”

Future Portrait of the Athletic Brain: Mechanistic Understanding of Human Sport Performance Via Animal Neurophysiology of Motor Behavior

“…Remarkable results have been achieved; for instance, it was demonstrated that dendritic activity recorded optically from the motor cortex of monkeys transfected to express a fluorescent activity reporter in excitatory neurons could reliably be employed to predict the direction of the arm movement [ Trautmann et al, 2019 , preprint article ]. Manipulating cerebellar neurons via optogenetics could drive saccade movements ( El-Shamayleh et al, 2017 ), while performing similar recordings and stimulation in the motor cortex of marmoset monkeys has been employed to investigate the neural dynamics of arm movements ( Ebina et al, 2018 , 2019 ).…”

Visual Neuroscience Methods for Marmosets: Efficient Receptive Field Mapping and Head-Free Eye Tracking

“…Studies in the awake marmoset have predominantly been performed under head fixation. This has been used for various recording and stimulation approaches, like electrocorticographic (Hung et al, 2015), extracellular microelectrode (Johnston et al, 2018;Remington et al, 2012), and intracellular (Gao et al, 2016;Gao and Wang, 2019) neuronal recordings, microstimulation (Selvanayagam et al, 2019), fMRI (Belcher et al, 2013;Hung et al, 2015;Liu et al, 2013;Schaeffer et al, 2019), as well as calcium imaging (Mehta et al, 2019;Yamada et al, 2004) and optogenetics (Ebina et al, 2019;Macdougall et al, 2016).…”