Data from: Dye-enhanced visualization of rat whiskers for behavioral studies

Visualization and tracking of the facial whiskers is required in an increasing number of rodent studies. Though many approaches have been employed, only high-speed videography has proven adequate for measuring whisker motion and deformation during interaction with an object. However, whisker visualization and tracking is challenging for multiple reasons, primary among them the low contrast of the whisker against its background. Here we demonstrate a fluorescent dye method suitable for visualization of one or more rat whiskers. The process makes the dyed whisker(s) easily visible against a dark background. The coloring does not influence the behavioral performance of rats trained on a vibrissal vibrotactile discrimination task, nor does it affect the whiskers' mechanical properties.READMEinstructionselab_video.zipthe whole pre-elaborated dataset (i.e., whisker shape has been extracted from videos through time). to unzip please note that it is needed the whole file list in the same folder of unzipData.sh, where the file list is {elab_video.zip elab_video.z01 elab_video.z03 elab_video.z05 elab_video.z07 elab_video.z02 elab_video.z04 elab_video.z06}elab_video.z01elab_video.z02elab_video.z03elab_video.z04elab_video.z05elab_video.z06elab_video.z07ratto1.zipone video trial shared for a whisker tracking demo, which can produce the data which is shared in elab_video folder. to unzip please note that it is needed the whole file list in the same folder of unzipData.sh, where the file list is {ratto1.zip ratto1.z01}ratto1.z01whisker-dynamic-response.zipsource code to elaborate videos and produce figures. it was cloned from github by "git clone -b shared4paper https://github.com/pgallir/whisker-dynamic-response".camrec450_verFunc.ziplabview project for data acquisition. the folder camrec450_verFunc/stim/ contains the stimulus library that was used as input to the shaker, and the code to generate it.compressData.shcode used to compress and split data to produce this shared dataset.unzipData.shcode to merge data parts and decompress from this shared dataset back to folders.supplementaryimages to produce supplementary figures are in folders: colorationprocess; photobleaching. updated code: updated-whisker-dynamic-respons