Zichen Wang, Jing Yu, Muyue Zhai, Zehua Wang, Kaiwen Sheng, Yu Zhu, Tianyu Wang, Mianzhi Liu, Lu Wang, Miao Yan, Jue Zhang, Ying Xu, Xianhua Wang, Lei Ma, Wei Hu, Heping Cheng
The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is the mammalian central circadian pacemaker with heterogeneous neurons acting in concert while each neuron harbors a self-sustained molecular clockwork. Nevertheless, how system-level SCN signals encode time of the day remains enigmatic. Here we show that population-level Ca2+ signals predict hourly time, via a group decision-making mechanism coupled with a spatially modular time feature representation in the SCN. Specifically, we developed a high-speed dual-view two-photon microscope for volumetric Ca2+ imaging of up to 9000 GABAergic neurons in adult SCN slices, and leveraged machine learning methods to capture emergent properties from multiscale Ca2+ signals as a whole...
April 11, 2024: Cell Research