Miniscope Newsletter, September 2026

Draft. This issue isn't listed on News, the Main Page or project pages. Change its status to Published when it's ready to go out.

Newsletter · Issue 01 · Sep 30, 2026

Covering Jul 1 – Sep 30, 2026

Welcome to the first Miniscope Newsletter! Each month, we’ll send a short email with news from the UCLA Miniscope Project and the wider Miniscope community: publications and preprints, hardware and software releases, workshops and office hours, new wiki resources, and useful forum discussions. Each issue will be sent to the mailing list and archived on the wiki's News page.

Introducing the new Miniscope wiki

miniscope.org has a new home. The wiki is now the open-access knowledge base for the UCLA Miniscope Project, with designs, software, protocols, publications, and community resources in one place. Anyone can read it. With an account you can also post on the forum and add content. The old wiki is still online while we move material over.

Where to start:

• Projects: every Miniscope design, including Miniscope V4 and Miniscope Zero, with build guides, software, and papers.
• Guides: step-by-step how-tos, calibration walkthroughs, and reference material.
• Experiment Registry: a searchable record of published Miniscope preparations, including brain region, indicator, lens, and species.
• FAQ: answers to the questions that come up most often on the forum, from dropped frames to GRIN lens choice.
• Forum: ask questions, share results, and see what other labs are doing.
• Events and Office hours: workshops, training, and our biweekly drop-in sessions.
• Publications: papers that use Miniscopes.

Anyone can read the wiki without an account. To post on the discussion forum, create a community profile, or contribute content, you'll need to request an account. We review requests manually to prevent spam, so approval may take a little time.

The forum is the place to go for questions, troubleshooting, and sharing protocols. Recurring questions and useful community contributions can also become guides and FAQ pages, making that information easier for others to find.

The wiki is still growing, so if something's missing or wrong, leave us a note on that page's talk page.

Preprint for the Miniscope Zero, a fully wireless Miniscope, is now available!

A QSCR cavity powers the Miniscope Zero wirelessly; a two-way optical link handles data and control. Co-first authors: Takuya Sasatani, PhD, and Marcel Brosch, PhD.

Congratulations to Marcel Brosch, PhD and Takuya Sasatani, PhD on their preprint describing Miniscope Zero, now on bioRxiv. Miniscope Zero is a one-photon calcium-imaging platform with no data tether and no power tether — named for its zero-tether operation. It combines wide-area wireless power based on quasistatic cavity resonance (QSCR) with a high-bandwidth optical data link, supporting real-time cellular-resolution imaging in freely behaving mice.

• Preprint on bioRxiv
• Project page
• Quick look at figures and videos

Ways to participate

Miniscope Use Survey. We're building a clearer picture of who uses UCLA Miniscopes and how, so we can decide what to prioritize in workshops, documentation, and support. It takes three to five minutes and stays open. You don't need to be using Miniscopes right now; if you have any contact with the UCLA Miniscope ecosystem, including if you're just getting started or work with the tools indirectly, we'd like to hear from you. Take the survey

Drop-in office hours. Every other Friday, 10–11 AM Pacific, on Zoom. There's no agenda. Bring questions about hardware, surgery, imaging, analysis, or troubleshooting. Sessions are recorded so recurring questions can become documentation. The next one is Friday 2 October. Register · Full schedule

— The UCLA Miniscope team

Have something for the next issue, such as a paper, a tool, or a fix others should know about? Post it on the forum.

miniscope.org · Forum · Events · Past issues