Blog
Dataset highlights, new features, and best practices from the team behind the DANDI Archive.
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A Nobel Prize for Controlling the Brain with Light
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine honors optogenetics, a method for switching brain cells on and off with light using a protein borrowed from pond algae. Here is what the technology is, where it came from, and where you can explore open datasets on DANDI that use it.
Suggesting Metadata Improvements to Dandiset Owners
We are using an AI assistant to find gaps in dandiset metadata, fill them from public sources, and send each owner a link that opens the DANDI metadata editor with the changes ready to review. Nothing changes on the archive until the owner commits.
DANDI Notebooks: Persistent, Executable Companions to Neurophysiology Data
Every notebook on notebooks.dandiarchive.org can now be opened in Google Colab with one click or run locally in a verified container image. Together these make the notebook collection a platform for sharing analyses that stay executable.
Place Cells in Space: Hippocampal Recordings from the Space Shuttle
In 1998, three rats flew aboard the Space Shuttle as part of the Neurolab mission, carrying tiny electrode arrays in their brains. The goal: to find out whether the hippocampus, the brain’s internal GPS, can build a map of space when there is no gravity. Over 25 years later, these historic recordings are now publicly available on DANDI as Dandiset #001754.
Introducing DANDI Atlas Explorer: Explore the DANDI Archive in 3D
DANDI Atlas Explorer is an interactive 3D brain viewer that maps DANDI Archive datasets onto the Allen Common Coordinate Framework mouse brain atlas, letting researchers explore data availability by brain region.
NWB Compression Recommendations for DANDI Archive
An analysis of HDF5 and Zarr compression options for NWB files submitted to the DANDI Archive, providing recommendations based on file size, read speed, and write speed.
Unraveling Anesthesia's Effect on Brain Activity
Have you ever wondered what happens to your brain when you’re under anesthesia? What neural changes coincide with that dramatic loss of consciousness? In this post, we’ll explore how two different research teams investigated this fascinating question using the same data from DANDI Archive’s Dandiset #000458.
Human ex-vivo microscopy workshop/hackathon
The goal of this set of events is to introduce the BICCN human ex vivo MRI and microscopy datasets, involve the relevant communities to develop and explore scientific ideas, create tooling around these and future datasets to make it easy, and plan towards development of an online, digital, cellular atlas and knowledge base of the human brain.
External Links in NWB and DANDI
External Files: video/audio files that are part of the experiment but are not stored in NWB as HDF5 format.
DANDI User Workshop
Virtual hands-on workshop: Nov 1, 2021
DANDI: A data archive and collaboration space for neurophysiology
DANDI is a US BRAIN Initiative supported data archive for publishing and sharing neurophysiology data including intracellular and extracellular electrophysiology, optophysiology, and behavioral time-series, and images from immunostaining experiments. For …