Ed Boyden, leader of the Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Group at MIT, has just started a blog.
I wrote about some of Boyden's work earlier this year. His is one of several groups that have used a light-sensitive bacterial protein called channelrhodopsin to develop an "optical switch" that can activate or inhibit neurons.
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This year, several research groups have used bacterial proteins called channelrhodopsins to develop a technique with which light can be used to control the activity of nerve cells or the behaviour of small organisms.
For example, Ed Boyden's group at the MIT Media Lab used the method to activate…
Optogenetics is a newly developed technique based on a group of light-sensitive proteins called channelrhodopsins, which were isolated recently from various species of micro-organism. Although relatively new, this technique has already proven to be extremely powerful, because channelrhodopsins can…
Optogenetics is a recently developed technique based on microbial proteins called channelrhodopsins (ChRs), which render neurons sensitive to light when inserted into them, thus enabling researchers to manipulate the activity of the cells using laser pulses.
Although still very new - the first…
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