Instead, Boyden and his colleagues built a robot to screen millions of proteins. But fluorescent molecules used for this kind of imaging have been limited in their speed of response, sensitivity to changes in voltage, and resistance to photobleaching (fading caused by exposure to light). For the past two decades, Boyden and other scientists have sought a way to monitor electrical activity in the brain through optogenetic imaging, instead of recording with electrodes. “Imaging of neuronal activity using voltage sensors opens up the exciting possibility for simultaneous recordings of large populations of neurons with single-cell single-spike resolution in vivo,” the researchers report in the paper. The new method is also more effective than current optogenetics methods, which also use light-sensitive proteins to silence or stimulate neuron activity.
“Now we can record the neural activity of many cells in a neural circuit and hear them as they talk to each other,” he says. Boyden is the senior author of the study, which appears in the Feb. “If you put an electrode in the brain, it’s like trying to understand a phone conversation by hearing only one person talk,” says Edward Boyden*, Ph.D., an associate professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and a pioneer in optogenetics (a technique that allows scientists to control neurons’ electrical activity with light by engineering them to express light-sensitive proteins). This could allow scientists to study how neurons behave, millisecond by millisecond, as the brain performs a particular function.īetter than electrodes. They’ve developed a new light-sensitive protein that can be embedded into neuron membranes, where it emits a fluorescent signal that indicates how much voltage a particular cell is experiencing. Researchers at MIT have developed a new approach to measure electrical activity deep in the brain: using light - an easier, faster, and more informative method than inserting electrodes. This could allow scientists to more effectively study how neurons behave, millisecond by millisecond, as the brain performs a particular function.
MIT researchers have developed a light-sensitive protein that can be embedded into neuron membranes, where it emits a fluorescent signal that indicates how much voltage a particular cell is experiencing.
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