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Optogenetics, the use of light sensitive proteins (opsins) to manipulate cell activity, enables researchers to silence or incite neuronal firing and study subsequent effects on behavior. The system is an especially powerful tool for in vivo behavioral studies because it is ...
This post was contributed by guest blogger Derek Simon.
This post was contributed by guest blogger Derek Simon. The surgeries and standard molecular neuroscience validation experiments we discussed last week are only half of the battle when using optogentics to answer a research question. The flip side of the optogenetics coin is ...
This post was contributed by guest blogger Derek Simon. Optogenetics is spreading through the neuroscience community like wildfire and for good reason. For the first time in the history of neuroscience research we have a technology that allows us to show causality in neural ...
As optogenetics turns 10 years old, it’s easy to forget that this technique isn’t limited to neuroscience. In fact, precise light-based control of biological processes is highly useful in other fields, including synthetic biology. Addgene depositors Christopher Voigt and Jeffrey ...
As MIT's Ed Boyden explains it, his goal is "to understand the brain at a level of abstraction that enables the engineering of its function." Once scientists can do that, they will not only understand how the brain works, but also how to fix it when things go awry. To reach that ...
When neuroscience graduate student Silvana Konermann first entered Feng Zhang’s lab at MIT, the use of customizable DNA-binding domains based on transcription-activator-like effectors (TALEs) as anchors for genome engineering applications was still very new. Now, Konermann and ...
