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Controlling movement with light
For the first time, neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown they can control muscle movement by applying optogenetics -- a technique that allows scientists to control neurons’ electrical impulses with light -- to the spinal cords of animals that are awake and alert. Such findings offer a new approach to studying the complex spinal circuits that coordinate movement and sensory processing, the researchers say.
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Led by MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research professor Emilio Bizzi, the researchers studied mice in which a light-sensitive protein that promotes neural activity was inserted into a subset of spinal neurons. When the researchers shone blue light on the animals’ spinal cords, their hind legs were completely but reversibly immobilized.
Researchers used optogenetics to explore the function of inhibitory interneurons, which form circuits with many other neurons in the spinal cord. These circuits execute commands from the brain, with additional input from sensory information from the limbs.
Neuroscientists have used electrical stimulation or pharmacological intervention to control neurons’ activity and try to tease out their function, but while these approaches have revealed a great deal of information about spinal control, they do not offer precise enough control to study specific subsets of neurons. Optogenetics, on the other hand, allows scientists to control specific types of neurons by genetically programming them to express light-sensitive proteins.
To learn more about this research, see the NSF News From the Field story Controlling movement with light. (Date image taken: unknown; date originally posted to NSF Multimedia Gallery: Aug. 16, 2017)
Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT
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