Large-scale voltage imaging in the brain using targeted illumination

Recent improvements in genetically encoded voltage indicators enabled optical imaging of action potentials and subthreshold membrane voltage dynamics from single neurons in the mammalian brain. To perform high speed voltage imaging, widefield microscopy remains an essential tool for recording activity from many neurons simultaneously over a large anatomical area. However, the lack of optical sectioning makes widefield microscopy more prone to background signal contamination, and thus far voltage imaging using fully genetically encoded voltage indicators remains limited to simultaneous sampling of a few cells over a restricted field-of-view. We here demonstrate a strategy for large scale voltage imaging using the fully genetically encoded voltage indicator SomArchon and targeted illumination. We implemented a simple, low-cost digital micromirror device based targeted illumination strategy to restrict illumination to the cells of interest, and systematically quantified the improvement of this microscopy design theoretically and experimentally with SomArchon expressing neurons in single layer cell cultures and in the brains of awake mice. We found that targeted illumination, in comparison to widefield illumination, increased SomArchon signal contrast and reduced background cross-contamination in the brain. Such improvement permitted the reduction of illumination intensity, and thus reduced fluorescence photobleaching and prolonged imaging duration. When coupled with a high-speed, large area sCMOS camera, we routinely imaged tens of spiking neurons simultaneously over minutes in the brain. Thus, the widefield microscopy design with an integrated targeted illumination system described here offers a simple solution for voltage imaging analysis of large neuron populations in behaving animals.