It is needless to say that calcium imaging can be successfully performed in many other species, including zebrafish (e.g., Brustein et al., 2003, Sumbre et al., 2008 and Yaksi selleck chemicals et al., 2009), Aplysia (e.g., Gitler and Spira, 1998), crayfish (e.g., Ravin et al., 1997), developing Xenopus (e.g., Demarque and Spitzer, 2010, Hiramoto and Cline,

2009 and Tao et al., 2001), frog (e.g., Delaney et al., 2001), squid (e.g., Smith et al., 1993), turtle (e.g., Wachowiak et al., 2002), Drosophila (e.g., Seelig et al., 2010, Wang et al., 2003 and Yu et al., 2003), blowfly (e.g., Elyada et al., 2009), and honey bee (e.g., Galizia et al., 1999). Imaging dendritic spines, the postsynaptic site of excitatory connections in many neurons, was one of the first biological applications of two-photon calcium imaging. Combining two-photon microscopy with calcium imaging in hippocampal brain slices demonstrated that calcium signals can be restricted

to dendritic spines (Figures 5Aa and 5Ab) (Yuste and Denk, 1995). The authors showed additionally that spine calcium signals were abolished by the application of the blockers of glutamatergic transmission. Subsequently, synaptically evoked spine calcium signaling was found to be caused by a variety of other mechanisms, depending on the type of neuron (Denk et al., 1995, Finch and Augustine, 1998, Kovalchuk et al., 2000, Raymond and Redman, 2006 and Wang et al., 2000). For example, Inhibitor Library Figures 5Ac and 5Ad show results obtained with confocal calcium imaging from mouse cerebellar parallel fiber-Purkinje cell synapses. The authors identified the calcium signaling mechanism of metabotropic glutamate receptor type 1-mediated transmission, involving calcium release from internal stores in dendrites and spines (Takechi et al., 1998). It has been shown that such a localized dendritic calcium signaling is essential for the induction of long-term synaptic depression (Konnerth et al., 1992 and Wang et al., 2000), a possible cellular mechanism underlying motor learning in the cerebellum (Aiba et al., 1994 and Bender et al., 2006). Similarly, the calcium dynamics at presynaptic terminals are

also accessible to calcium imaging (Delaney et al., 1989, Regehr and Tank, 1991a, Regehr and Tank, 1991b, Rusakov et al., 2004 and Smith et al., 1993). For this purpose, selleck products presynaptic terminals are loaded with an appropriate calcium indicator dye. A nice example is illustrated in Figures 5Ba–5Bc. To image climbing fibers in the cerebellar cortex, the authors injected the calcium indicator fluo-4 together with the morphological marker Texas red dextran upstream into the inferior olive of neonatal rats in vivo (Kreitzer et al., 2000). The dextran-conjugated calcium dye and Texas red were taken up by the inferior olive neurons and diffused within a few days through the climbing fibers to the cerebellar cortex. Thus, climbing fibers could be identified in subsequently prepared cerebellar slices.