neurodudes

Video-Rate Far-Field Optical Nanoscopy Dissects Synaptic Vesicle Movement

Just the optical engineering alone here deserves mention: 28 frames per second at 62nm resolution (well below the diffraction limit of 260nm for light of the wavelength used)! STED (or stimulated emission depletion, developed in Stefan Hell’s group) is ideal for visualizing synaptic vesicles, whose small size (~50nm) has typically confined them to the domain of electron microscopists. The ability to get high-speed STED allowed the researchers to track individual vesicles and their path dynamics. They conclude that vesicle movement has both motor-driven and diffusive components (ie. a biased random walk). I’m sure with more time and more analysis there will be a lot of interesting applications for this kind of real-time vesicle tracking. Perhaps in the near future we will have single vesicle “minis” monitored at multiple sites through microscopy instead of just one or two sites electrophysiologically…

Here’s the resolution difference between STED and confocal for a single vesicle:

And, for those of you with ~$1.25M lying around, you can now purchase a STED setup directly from Leica!

Pascual-Marqui has posted a preprint and would like comments. Read on for details.

(more…)

Gerstner’s group in Lausanne, Switzerland has announced a competition to predict the electrical behavior of individual neurons in two respects:

1) predict the timing of every spike that a neuron emits with a precision of 2ms.

2) predict the subthreshold membrane potential with a precision of 2mV for arbitrary input.

Details on the competition, including the dataset (released 16 March 2007), are here.

Note that the first prize winner receives:

- 4 nights of hotel in Lausanne at the Lake Geneva, June 23-27.
- Free participation in the Quantitative Neuron Modeling workshop June 25/26
- 35-minute-slot for talk as an Invited Speaker in the workshop.

get coding.

This week’s Nature has quite a few additional halorhodopsin articles for photochannel fans.

Halorhodopsin article from Deisseroth’s lab:
Multimodal fast optical interrogation of neural circuitry [News & Views]

Also, there is an intriguing article on both the general excitement in the neuroscience community with this new technology and a possible intellectual property dispute over it.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a popular technology for stimulating human cortical neurons, due to its safety, noninvasiveness, and efficacy. A TMS device is just a little coil of wire, through which 10,000 Amps of current is cranked during a period of only a few hundred microseconds; the resultant rapidly-changing magnetic field induces eddy currents in the brain. Depending on the protocol used, TMS can drive/inhibit a region of cortex corresponding to roughly a cubic centimeter or two, and is being explored for the treatment of depression, the reduction of auditory hallucinations during schizophrenia, and the alleviation of tinnitus and migraines. Thousands of papers on medicine and psychology have been written using this tool.

Yet the device itself is expensive and rare — they can run from $20,000 to $50,000 or even more, despite the fact that they are, in essence, a coil, a switch, a bank of capacitors, and a power supply. Much of the art lies in making the devices safe and fail-proof. Is it possible to hack/engineer a system that is safe, fault-tolerant, efficacious, and inexpensive? And furthermore, can we facilitate a community that will devise such devices, and share information about protocols and approaches to brain hacking?

This past August at Foo Camp, a hackers’ conference in Northern California, a group of people got together and set out to do just that. We are designing a safe, noninvasive, modular, and “open source” brain stimulator that will open up the field of circuit modulation to a wider audience. Members of the group include therapists and mental health professionals, engineers, programmers, and others interested in either the development of such devices, or the sharing of information on this front. Key to the design is safety — we want to make sure that the devices we create are as safe as devices on the market. Also, all the information is released under the Creative Commons “Attribution and Sharealike” license. This is a new model for “open source” medical device development — which may move it beyond the domain of simply creating “cool toys,” and to creating real devices.

You can find out more information, or contribute to the project, or learn from the project, at
http://transcenmentalism.org/OpenStim/

-Ed

Biophysics of Biological Circuits:
From Molecules to Networks
Summer School
http://www.uam.es/otroscentros/inc/summerschools/summerschool2006/

Engineering Principles in Biological Systems
Cold Spring Harbor Meeting
http://meetings.cshl.edu/meetings/engine06.shtml

The Nernst/Goldman Equation Simulator

An awesome simulator of Nernst and Hodgkin-Goldman-Katz eqns for membrane potential given variable ion permeabilities… with a very slick interface and downloadable programs for Mac and Windows. Also, there is a flash-based web version, too.

A genetically encoded fluorescent amino acid — Summerer et al. 103 (26): 9785 — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Some cool silicon biology to add to the toolbox. Now you can tag proteins by using a nonsense codon that codes for a fluorescent amino acid-tRNA. This technique and similar ones could easily revolutionize cellular tracking of protein trafficking.

Modulation of intracortical synaptic potentials by presynaptic somatic membrane potential : Nature

Very interesting work. Modulation of the somatic potential seems to influence the EPSP, as measured by paired patch recordings of two layer 5 cells in cortical slice. Somatic depolarization from resting potential to near threshold results in an increase in evoked EPSPs.

In synaptic physiology, we often make a point of distinguishing intrinsic changes (eg. membrane potential) from synaptic conductance changes. Now it looks like the line between those might be a bit blurry!

Here’s a N&V by Eve Marder too.

How would you cure blindness, if your phototransducing rods and cones had degenerated - as happens in syndromes that affect millions of people worldwide? A lot of investigators have tried to create very complicated electrical stimulators that drive patterned activity in the retina. You need a power source, a camera of sorts, a computational element, and an array of electrodes that can crank out precise, well-timed current pulses, for a long time. It’s a heroic piece of optical and electrical engineering.

But what if you just made other cells in the retina light-sensitive? Channelrhodopsin and other light-activated ion channels have opened up this new kind of endeavor.

Investigators at Wayne State University, the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, and Beijing University have now done this. They expressed Channelrhodopsin in retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) of mice with photoreceptor degeneration. Remarkably, for months afterwards, the RGCs were able to transmit visual information all the way to visual cortex. In mice without channelrhodopsin, these visual evoked responses were never seen. A very impressive piece of systems bioengineering.

Ectopic Expression of a Microbial-Type Rhodopsin Restores Visual Responses in Mice with Photoreceptor Degeneration
Anding Bi, Jinjuan Cui, Yu-Ping Ma, Elena Olshevskaya, Mingliang Pu, Alexander M. Dizhoor, and Zhuo-Hua Pan

— Ed