STARDUST: a pipeline for the unbiased analysis of astrocyte regional calcium dynamics

Calcium imaging has become a popular way to probe astrocyte activity, but few analysis methods holistically capture discrete calcium signals that occur across the astrocyte domain. Here, we introduce STARDUST, a pipeline for the Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Regional Dynamics & Unbiased Sorting of Transients from fluorescence recordings of astrocytes, and provide step-by-step guidelines. STARDUST yields fluorescence time- series from data-defined regions of activity and performs systematic signal detection and feature extraction, enabling the in-depth and unbiased study of astrocyte calcium signals. Graphical abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=200 SRC="FIGDIR/small/588196v2_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (40K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@c6a97aorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@a0b0fdorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1c3dd73org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1ffa9ec_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG