Animation of material for individual particles

I would like to create an animation, in which each particle changes its color according to some externally generated data (spiking activity of neurons from a neural network simulation).

Is there a way to create a particle system with e.g. 1000 particles and to keyframe the color of each particle individually?

Thank you,
Martin

which render engine are you planning to use?

I would prefer cycles, but as long as it works in any render-engine I don’t care actually. do you have an idea?

In cycles you can use the particle index to change anything about a specific particle. About the external data, you can create a animation texture, with each pixel having the information you need to pass to the particle, and then use the particle index to calculate which pixel would have the data for each particle.

In what kind of format is the external generated data?

thank you secrop. I will try that out. The external data are in csv-format and basically encode an animated color for each particle. So the way to go would be to generate a texture and use it as input for the particles. I am wondering, whether I can use the u-axis of the texture for indexing the neurons and the v-axis for time. This would make it even easier. Will try that out.