Daffodil International University
Faculty of Engineering => EEE => Topic started by: Kazi Taufiqur Rahman on November 23, 2015, 11:44:54 PM
-
Flip a switch and you can turn on or off lights, fans and all sorts of other things. Individual nerve cells in the brain are now the latest addition to this list. Over the past decade, scientists have found a way to use light to control the brain’s nerve cells, or neurons.
This new field is called optogenetics (OP-toh-jeh-NEH-tix). Opto- is a prefix that refers to light. Genetics deals with the biological instructions encoded in our genes. As its name suggests, this new technology uses light to either turn on or shut down genetically programmed actions in brain cells.
Keith Bonin calls this technology “revolutionary.” He says it “is going to allow us to much better understand how the brain works.” A physicist, Bonin works at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.
The brain acts as command central for everything we do. It’s a hive of neurons — an estimated 86 billion of them. The brain also contains many different types of neurons. As many as 100,000 of the very smallest would fit on the head of a pin.
To understand how animals move, learn or behave, scientists used to have to wait and watch, hoping they would be there when an anticipated event or behavior might occur. No longer. With optogenetics, scientists now can turn on these tasks or behaviors with the flip of a switch. A light switch.
This new technology is opening up new pathways for research. For instance, scientists are learning more about what goes right in healthy brains — and wrong when brains are afflicted by various disorders.
Finding the right chemical switches
In many ways, the brain is a living computer. It receives data, processes them into information and then generates a response. And the brain does these things with electricity, just as computers do.
With a computer, however, you can easily enter data and then run a program to see what happens. Researchers have long wanted to do that with the brain. But it hasn’t been easy.
“There’s no keyboard for the brain,” notes Ed Boyden. He’s a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. He was on the research team in 2004 that first got optogenetics to work.
-
Thanks for sharing