Fig. 2

Merging and converting data prior to automated spike sorting. a, Organization and preparation of data for MountainSort pipeline. Sessions from the same mouse on the same day are placed into the same folder, with the data files organized in each session folder just as they are saved by Cheetah. The parent folder containing all of the ‘mouse & day’ subfolders is input into MATLAB to merge and convert the data. The output files are organized by tetrode, and saved in the mouse & day folder as they contain the signals acquired for all sessions within the folder. b, The m2021_mergeandconvert.m script imports the CSC.ncs files and saves the merged data as raw.mda. Three other files are saved; params.json contains the sample rate and spike direction, geom.csv indicates the tetrode geometry, and t_info.csv contains the start and end times of each recording that are used to split the merged files for session-by-session analysis. The lower panel depicts the m2021_mergeandconvert.m script to be run