Large scale in vivo recordings to study neuronal biophysics

•Characterizing the role of biophysics in sensory and non-sensory circuit coding.•Examining membrane dynamics can reveal circuit mechanisms for neural coding.•Understanding the challenges to linking single-cell biophysics with network coding.•New technologies for a larger scale examination of biophysics.

Over the last several years, technological advances have enabled researchers to more readily observe single-cell membrane biophysics in awake, behaving animals. Studies utilizing these technologies have provided important insights into the mechanisms generating functional neural codes in both sensory and non-sensory cortical circuits. Crucial for a deeper understanding of how membrane biophysics control circuit dynamics however, is a continued effort to move toward large scale studies of membrane biophysics, in terms of the numbers of neurons and ion channels examined. Future work faces a number of theoretical and technical challenges on this front but recent technological developments hold great promise for a larger scale understanding of how membrane biophysics contribute to circuit coding and computation.