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Saccadic eye movements evoked by optogenetic activation of primate V1

Nature Neuroscience volume 15, pages 1368–1370 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

Optogenetics has advanced our understanding of the neural basis of simple behaviors in rodents and small animals. In primates, however, for which more sophisticated behavioral assays exist, optogenetic manipulations of behavior have been unsuccessful. We found that monkeys reliably shifted their gaze toward the receptive field of optically driven channelrhodopsin-2–expressing neurons of the primary visual cortex. This result establishes optogenetics as a viable tool for the causal analysis of behavior in primate brain.

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Figure 1: Task description and distributions of saccade endpoints in Fix trials.
Figure 2: V1 activity associated with the four experimental conditions.
Figure 3: Histological analysis of ChR2 expression in V1.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank K. Deisseroth and M. Shadlen for sharing resources, F. Robinson, J. Garlid, E. Grover, J. Huang, D. Possin and L. Tait for technical assistance, and C. Fetch and C. Hass for help with the experiments. This work was supported by The McKnight Foundation and research grants EY001730, EY018849 and RR000166 from the US National Institutes of Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Mehrdad Jazayeri

  2. Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Washington National Primate Research Center, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Mehrdad Jazayeri, Zachary Lindbloom-Brown & Gregory D Horwitz

Authors
  1. Mehrdad Jazayeri
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  2. Zachary Lindbloom-Brown
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  3. Gregory D Horwitz
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Contributions

M.J., Z.L.-B. and G.D.H. conducted the experiments and analyzed the data. M.J. and G.D.H. wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Mehrdad Jazayeri.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Jazayeri, M., Lindbloom-Brown, Z. & Horwitz, G. Saccadic eye movements evoked by optogenetic activation of primate V1. Nat Neurosci 15, 1368–1370 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3210

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