Habituation during visual stimulation in zebrafish brain activity

This dataset contains acquisitions of the zebrafish brain activity carried out in Elavl3:H2BGCaMP6s larvae at 5 days post fertilization, raised at 28° C on a 12 h light/12 h dark cycle according to the approval by the Ethical Committee of the University of Padua (61/2020 dal Maschio). Larvae were embedded in 2 percent agarose gel and their brain activity was recorded using a multiphoton system with a custom 3D volumetric acquisition module. An entire volume of about 180 − 200um in thickness encompassing 30 planes separated by about 7um is acquired at a rate of 1 volume per second, sufficient to track the slow dynamics associated with the fluorescence-based activity reporter GCaMP6s. Recording was carried out during visual stimulation. Looming stimuli were generated using Stytra and presented monocularly on a 50×50mm screen using a DPL4500 projector by Texas Instruments. The dark looming dot was presented 10 times with 150s intervals, centered with the fish eye and with a l/v parameter of 8.3 s, reaching at the end of the stimulation a visual angle of 79.4° corresponding to an angular expansion rate of 9.5°/s. The acquired temporal series were first processed using an automatic pipeline, including motion artifact correction, temporal filtering with a rectangular window 3 seconds long, and automatic segmentation using Suite2P. Then, the obtained dataset was manually curated to resolve segmentation errors or to integrate cells not detected automatically. We fit the activity profiles of about 52,000 cells with a linear regression model using a set of base functions representing the expected responses to each of the stimulation events, obtained by convolving an exponentially decaying kernel of the GCaMP signal lifetime with square waveforms characterized by an amplitude different from zero only during the presentation of the corresponding visual stimulus. The resulting coefficients were divided for the mean squared error of the fit to obtain a set of scores. The activities of the cells whose scores fell within the top 5 of the distribution are reported in this dataset.