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When the electricity (and the lights) go out: transient changes in excitability

Nature Neuroscience volume 15, pages 1058–1060 (2012)Cite this article

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Natural or artificially induced electrical activity changes can alter ion balance so as to briefly influence firing. An optogenetics study delineates one mechanism: Cl− shifts causing seconds-long excitability changes after silencing.

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Figure 1: Interactions among unmodulated and directly modulated elements of neuronal circuitry.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Emily Ferenczi and Karl Deisseroth are in the Department of Bioengineering and the Neurosciences Program, and Karl Deisseroth is in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.,

    Emily Ferenczi & Karl Deisseroth

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  1. Emily Ferenczi
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  2. Karl Deisseroth
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Correspondence to Karl Deisseroth.

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Competing interests

All optogenetic tools and methods are distributed and supported freely from the authors’ laboratory (http://www.optogenetics.org/). Stanford University has filed for patents on tools developed in the laboratory that include K.D. as inventor, including proton and chloride pumps, to ensure this continued free distribution to the scientific and nonprofit community, and K.D. has cofounded and provides consultation for a company (Circuit Therapeutics) that uses these tools for drug screening, therapy development and analysis of diseased circuits. Full funding support is described at http://www.optogenetics.org/funding/.

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Ferenczi, E., Deisseroth, K. When the electricity (and the lights) go out: transient changes in excitability. Nat Neurosci 15, 1058–1060 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3172

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