Developing a 2-photon tracking microscope to record neural activity across multiple brains during social behaviours

A 2025 Crick PhD project with Michael Winding & Kurt Anderson.

This PhD project will be a joint position, supervised by Michael Winding (the Social Circuits and Connectomics Lab) and Kurt Anderson (the Advanced Light Microscopy STP). It involves the development of a novel 2-photon tracking microscope to image neural activity in the brains of multiple behaving animals simultaneously.

Social interactions are fundamental to animals, enabling cooperation, collective behaviour, mating, and social hierarchies. However, how groups of interconnected neurons – neural circuits – coordinate their activity to generate these behaviours is unclear. The primary obstacle is that technologies to image neural activity across multiple brains with the sufficient temporal and spatial resolution do not yet exist. 

The Winding lab uses the larva of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to study social behaviours. While foraging for food, individual animals choose between competitively foraging on their own and joining forces in cooperative digging groups [1]. To understand the neural basis of this behaviour, we have mapped the entire brain of the larva, including all neurons and their synaptic connections, resulting in the first insect brain connectome [2]. We have used this wiring diagram and linked genetic tools [3] to identify neural circuits that are required for cooperative behaviour. However, the computations performed by these circuits across animals is unclear. 

An important aspect of this project will be the development of a 2-photon microscope capable of imaging neuronal activity in more than one larval brain during feeding activity. This will require addressing several technical challenges, including a large field of view to image several brains at once, cellular level resolution to detect individual neurons, rapid volumetric imaging of several brain volumes per second [4], and tracking crawling animals [5]. The candidate will begin by assessing the available commercial options to identify the most suitable imaging platform and then adapt and optimise hardware and software to achieve the required imaging goals. The final component will be the analysis of neuronal firing patterns associated with different aspects of behaviour.