About ac-2.

Summary of the data.

The data consists of in vivo whole-cell patch clamp (voltage response) recordings from 40 neurons in the primary auditory cortex of rat in response to 25 ms long pure tones of different frequencies presented repeatedly in a pseudorandom sequence.  Most (29 of the 40) recordings also include simultaneously recorded local field potential (LFP) using a second patch electrode approximately 1/2 mm away from the whole-cell recording electrode.  One recording was made in an unanesthetized animal.  For the others, the following anesthetics (number of cells) were used: Pentobarbitol (13), Pentobarbitol with Diazepam (3), Urethane (17), Pentobarbitol w/TTX (1), Ketamine/Medetomidine w/TTX (5).

The experiments are described in:

• Deweese MR, Zador AM., Shared and private variability in the auditory cortex.   J Neurophysiol. 2004 Sep;92(3):1840-55.
• DeWeese MR, Zador AM., Non-Gaussian membrane potential dynamics imply sparse, synchronous activity in auditory cortex. J Neurosci. 2006 Nov 22;26(47):12206-18.
• DeWeese MR., Whole-cell recording in vivo.  Curr Protoc Neurosci. 2007 Jan;Chapter 6:Unit 6.22.

Format of the data.

Data is stored in matlab format.  Scripts and documentation are provided which allow loading the data into matlab and making plots of the neuronal response.

The data is organized into two directories:

• Anesthetized_wholecell_and_LFP_data - contains the response of 33 neurons to 32 different tones.  All LFP recordings are in this data.
  
• Unanesthetized_and_TTX_wholecell_data - contains the response of 7 neurons to 260 different tones (65 frequencies with four amplitudes each).

 Total size of the data (uncompressed) is about 1.5 GB.  All but 75 MB is in the first directory above.

How to download the data

Data may be downloaded from:
https://portal.nersc.gov/project/crcns/download/ac-2
A CRCNS.org account is required. See the download link for more instructions.   After logging in and downloading the files, store both files in the same directory, then unpack both the files.  The unix commands to unpack the files are:

tar xzf crcns-ac-2-docs_and_scripts.tar.gz  # unpacks documents and scripts
tar xzf crcns-ac-2.tar.gz  # unpacks the data

After the files are unpacked, the data and documentation will be located in a newly created directory tree, crcns/ac-2.

Getting help using the data.

If you have questions about using the data, post them on the forum for using data sets.  It is also possible to email questions to the data contributor.  However, posting questions to the forum is preferable because then everyone can see the answers.

How to cite the data

Publications created through usage of the data should cite the data set in the following recommended format:

Deweese, Michael R.; Zador, Anthony M. (2011): Whole cell recordings from neurons in the primary auditory cortex of rat in response to pure tones of different frequency and amplitude, along with recordings of nearby local field potential (LFP). CRCNS.org.
http://dx.doi.org/10.6080/K0G44N6R

The above citation uses a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which is assigned to the data set.  The DOI was created using DataCite (www.datacite.org) and the California Digital Library, "EZID" system (n2t.net/ezid/).