GoKawiilResearchers unveil 1-gram wireless Airscope for cortex-wide imaging in freely moving mice
Scientists developed Airscope, a wireless miniature mesoscope weighing just 1 gram that achieves 4 micrometer resolution across a 6 millimeter field of view at 12.5 Hz, capturing activity from over 8,500 neurons per animal without tethering. The device was used to image cortical activity in mice during natural behaviors including social dominance contests, swimming, maze exploration, and fear conditioning experiments involving simultaneous brain-spinal cord recordings.
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By removing the tethering constraint of earlier miniaturized microscopes, this technology could let researchers study brain-wide neural dynamics during genuinely unrestricted, naturalistic behavior and even across multiple interacting animals simultaneously. The researchers suggest this could make large-scale, cellular-resolution cortical recording broadly accessible for systems neuroscience, potentially enabling new insights into how distributed cortical circuits produce complex social and physical behaviors.
- Airscope is a 1-gram wireless mesoscope offering a 25-fold increase in simultaneously recorded neurons compared to prior tethered devices
- It enabled imaging during rich behaviors like swimming, maze exploration, and multi-animal social dominance interactions
- The system revealed cortical patterns linked to social dominance, reward location, and Granger-causal spinal-to-cortex signaling during fear conditioning
Source: nature.com — Zhang, 2026-10-19
Published there as: “Cortex-wide imaging in naturally behaving mice with 1-gram wireless mesoscopes”
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