Fig. 1: Wave activity in striatal acetylcholine (ACh) release in head-fixed mice.

a Mouse with a cranial window or GRIN lens above dorsal striatum (DS). b Region-of-interest where the fluorescent ACh signals was averaged from pixels that ran perpendicular to the mediolateral (ML) axis (colored lines). c Top: space (y-axis)–time (x-axis) rendition of (z-scored) ACh release along the ML aspect display a gradual movement of activity from the lateral side to the medial side (dots indicate location of maximal activity along the ML aspect). Bottom: 3 frames of ∆F/F₀ activity corresponding to 3 time points in the space–time rendition. d Top: 5-s-long space–time rendition of ACh release exhibit multiple diagonally oriented streaks representing wave-like progression of ACh release. White dots indicate the location of the peak activity. Bottom: spatial derivative of the location of peak activity provides an estimate of the instantaneous velocity of the ACh release along the ML aspect. Red rectangle indicates a time window when the ML velocity is negative, corresponding to a lateromedial wave. e Bootstrapping (see “Methods”) resulted in maximal mean spurious durations between velocity reversals, that were well below the empirically observed mean duration between velocity reversals (red). f Distribution of duration of waves (red) and inter-wave intervals (black) pooled from the mice expressing GRAB-ACh3.0. g Cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) of the mean velocities of waves imaged in the mice expressing GRAB-ACh3.0. h 5 s-long space–time rendition of ACh release—imaged via a 1 mm diameter GRIN lens in a mouse whose DS expressed iAChSnFR—exhibits waves (red boxes). Space and time scales and white spots same as in c. i CDFs of the mean velocities of waves imaged in mice 1-3 expressing iAChSnFR. j Distribution of duration of waves (red) and inter-wave intervals (black) pooled from the mice expressing iAChSnFR. g, i (and Supplementary Fig. 1a, b) demonstrate that this experiment was repeated in 9 mice independently with similar results. Source data are provided as a Source data file.