Recently, thermogenetic methods (Hamada et al. 2008; Peabody et al. 2009) have been developed to control neural activity with temperature-activatable ion channels, creating an effective way to activate neurons in large numbers of flies for genetic screening.
New photochemical tools for controlling neural activity.
How about chips implanted in the brain to control neural activity, Matrix-style?
"It's so difficult to get anything to work in the human brain at all," says Ed Boyden, an MIT neuroscientist who discussed his work using light to control neural activity, which could be developed into a treatment for blindness.
This ability to bidirectionally control neural activity allowed us to disrupt precise spike timing of neural activity without altering spike rate, a long-desired tool for systems neuroscientists interested in the role of synchronous or precisely timed neural activity in the brain.
Today, most studies, even those using optogenetics to control neural activity, rely on DAT-Cre or TH-Cre for targeting of DA cells.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.07192.025 Like the optoclamp, the voltage clamp relies on a continuously updated feedback loop to control neural activity.
Our implementations of the optoclamp are quite reliable for controlling neural activity in cultured networks and thalamic cells in vivo and the technique's simplicity lowers the barrier for its adoption.
Future work is now needed to determine how the mechanisms of homeostatic depression and potentiation are coordinated to precisely control neural activity, and if these mechanisms are also commonly employed at synapses in the mammalian brain.
Therefore, engineering designs that allow an investigator to advance the electrode accurately into a specific brain nucleus and the ability to control neural activity in vivo in conscious animals are critical for many future neuroscience studies.
