Silencing Brain Cells With Yellow And Blue Light
 Neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a powerful new class of tools to reversibly shut down brain activity using different colors of light.
When targeted to specific neurons, they could potentially lead to new treatments for abnormal brain activity associated with disorders including chronic pain, epilepsy, brain injury and Parkinson's disease.
Such disorders could best be treated by silencing, rather than stimulating abnormal brain activity. These new tools, or 'super silencers,' exert exquisite control over the timing in which overactive neural circuits are shut down -an effect that is not possible with existing drugs or other conventional therapies.
The National Science Foundation's division of mathematical sciences supports the research through a grant to the Cognitive Rhythms Collaborative, which is comprised of four research groups in the Boston area focused on questions in neuroscience. The collaborative brings together researchers with expertise ranging from experimental design to mathematical modeling.
The research paper, "High-Performance Genetically-Targetable Optical Neural Silencing by Light-Driven Proton Pumps," appears in the Jan. 7 issue of the journal Nature.
"Silencing different sets of neurons with different colors of light allows us to understand how they work together to implement brain functions," explains Ed Boyden, senior author of the study. "Using these new tools, we can look at two neural pathways and study how they compute together," he says.
The tools promise to help researchers understand how to control neural circuits, leading to new understandings and treatments for brain disorders. Boyden, the Benesse Career Development Professor in the MIT Media Lab and an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, calls brain disorders "some of the biggest unmet medical needs in the world."
Source: National Science Foundation
|
