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ALL-OPTICAL NEUROPHYSIOLOGY

Sculpting light to reveal brain function

Nature Neuroscience volume 21, pages 776–778 (2018)Cite this article

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New techniques enable simultaneous optogenetic stimulation and calcium imaging from ensembles of tens of neurons in vivo. Improved opsins are localized to the cell body, minimizing spurious activation of the optically unresolvable neuropil. Two-photon light pulses are sculpted in space, time, and wavelength to efficiently target the desired cells.

Every electrical engineer has on her or his bench a function generator and an oscilloscope: the first to inject test signals into an electrical circuit and the second to record the output at distinct points. Together these tools permit detailed measurement of the input–output properties of subcircuits or individual circuit elements, ultimately revealing the working of the whole. Neuroscientists have used electrodes to attach function generators and oscilloscopes to neural tissue for more than a hundred years, but we still haven’t deciphered the input–output properties of most of the brain’s circuits. Why? One reason is the immensely more complex wiring of the brain compared to most electrical circuits. Each neuron may connect to thousands of synaptic partners, but stimulating and recording more than a handful of specified cells in vivo is beyond the limits of electrodes.

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Fig. 1: Optical control and readout of neural ensembles with 3D-SHOT.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Adam E. Cohen & Samouil L. Farhi

  2. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Adam E. Cohen

  3. Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Adam E. Cohen

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  1. Adam E. Cohen
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  2. Samouil L. Farhi
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Correspondence to Adam E. Cohen.

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Cohen, A.E., Farhi, S.L. Sculpting light to reveal brain function. Nat Neurosci 21, 776–778 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-018-0158-5

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