Microscope Controls Brain Activity of Live Animals

For the first time, researchers have developed a microscope capable of observing — and manipulating — neural activity in the brains of live animals at the scale of a single cell with millisecond precision. By allowing scientists to directly control the firing of individual neurons within complex brain circuits, the device could ultimately revolutionize how neuroscience is done and lead to new insights about healthy brain functioning and neurological disorders.

With this new microscope, we believe we will soon be able to treat the brain as the keyboard of a piano, so to speak, and write in a sequence of activity that is needed to understand or correct brain function,” said Hillel Adesnik, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the research team. “After more refinements, this instrument may be able to function as a sort of Rosetta Stone to help us crack the neural code.”

Adesnik will present this research at the American Association of Anatomists Annual Meeting during Experimental Biology 2016.

To process inputs, store information and issue commands, the brain’s neurons communicate with each other through on-off electrical signals akin to the ones and zeroes used to encode information in computer programming. Although scientists have long been able to observe these signals with various imaging techniques, without understanding the “syntax” of how that digital code translates into information, the brain’s communication system has been essentially indecipherable.

“If you want to learn a language, you need a dictionary, and if you want to understand how a machine works, you need to know its parts,” said Adesnik. “We wanted to develop a technology that can offer a general approach to understand the basic syntax of neural signals, so that we can begin to understand what a given brain circuit is doing and perhaps what’s gone wrong with that in the case of a disease.”

The best way to learn that syntax, Adesnik said, is to not simply read the information, but to actually write it by making small tweaks in the code, inputting the new code back into the brain and seeing how it alters a perception or behavior. The new microscope, which Adesnik’s team developed by combining and building upon several existing technologies developed by other researchers, is the first to be able to handle and transmit information at a spatial and temporal scale that is truly relevant to manipulating brain activity.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160405221358.htm