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  • NEWS FEATURE

A new way to capture the brain’s electrical symphony

How voltage readings from individual neurons could power the next revolution in neuroscience.
  1. Giorgia Guglielmi

    1. Giorgia Guglielmi is a freelance science journalist in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Illustration by Joanna Gebal

Biophysicist Adam Cohen was strolling around San Francisco, California, in 2010, when a telephone call caught him by surprise. “We have a signal,” said the caller. Nearly 5,000 kilometres away, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his collaborators had struck gold. After months of failed experiments, the researchers had found a fluorescent protein that allowed them to watch signals as they passed between neurons.

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Nature 561, 300-302 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06694-6

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