The McGill-Mouse-Marmoset Platform: A Standardized Approach for High-throughput Imaging of Neuronal Dynamics During Behavior

Understanding the rules that govern neuronal dynamics throughout the brain to subserve behavior and cognition remain one of the biggest challenges in neuroscience research. Recent technical advances enable the recording of increasingly larger neuronal populations to produce increasingly more sophisticated datasets. Despite bold and important open-science and data-sharing policies, these datasets tend to include unique data acquisition methods, behavior, and file structures. Discrepancies between experimental protocols present several key challenges including the analysis of the data itself, comparison of data collected between laboratories, and for the comparison of dynamics between brain regions and species. Here, we discuss our recent efforts to create a standardized and high-throughput research platform to address these issues. The McGill-Mouse-Marmoset (M3) platform combines miniscope calcium imaging recording in both mice and marmosets with standardized touchscreen-based behavioral testing. The goal is to curate an open-source and standardized framework for acquiring, analyzing, and accessing high-quality data of the neuronal dynamics that underly cognition throughout the brain in mice, marmosets, and models of disease. We end with a discussion of future developments and a call for users to adopt this standardized approach.