New Tool Offers Snapshots of Neuron Activity

저자：   업로드：2017-06-28  조회수：

    Many cognitive processes, such as decision-making, take place within seconds or minutes. Neuroscientists have longed to capture neuron activity during such tasks, but that dream has remained elusive — until now.

    Scientists at MIT and Stanford say they have developed a technique named FLARE to label neurons when they become active to provide a view of their activity at a moment in time. The method could offer important new insights into neuronal function by offering greater temporal precision than current cell-labeling techniques, which capture activity across time windows of hours or days, according to the investigators.

    "A thought or a cognitive function usually lasts 30 seconds or a minute. That's the range of what we're hoping to be able to capture," says Kay Tye, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, a member of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. She is one of the senior authors of the study (“A Light- and Calcium-Gated Transcription Factor for Imaging and Manipulating Activated Neurons”), which appears in Nature Biotechnology.

    “…we present FLARE, an engineered transcription factor that drives expression of fluorescent proteins, opsins, and other genetically encoded tools only in the subset of neurons that experienced activity during a user-defined time window,” write the researchers. “FLARE senses the coincidence of elevated cytosolic calcium and externally applied blue light, which together produce translocation of a membrane-anchored transcription factor to the nucleus to drive expression of any transgene.”

    Dr. Tye believes that the novel tool could be used to help decipher the neural circuits involved in learning and memory, among many other possibilities. She developed the technology with former MIT professor Alice Ting, Ph.D., who is now a professor of genetics and biology at Stanford and is also a senior author of the paper. The paper's lead author is Wenjing Wang, Ph.D., a Stanford postdoc.

    Existing tools allow researchers to engineer cells so that when neurons turn on a gene called cfos, which helps cells respond to new information, they also turn on an artificially introduced gene for a fluorescent protein or another tagging molecule. The system is designed so that this labeling takes place only when animals are exposed to a drug that activates the system, giving scientists control over the timing. However, the control is not very precise.

    "Those activity-de

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