Genetic engineering can now help researchers use magnets to control nervous systems. Scientists have successfully controlled the behavior of zebrafish and mice with this research, and suggest that one day it might help treat brain disorders in people.
In the past decade or so, scientists have devised a way to control brain activity with lasers. This strategy, called optogenetics, uses viruses to insert genes into cells and make them sensitive to light coming from the lasers. Optogenetics has revolutionized neuroscience by giving researchers a precise way to excite or suppress neural circuits and shed light on what role they play in the brain.
Optogenetics possesses a number of advantages over previous methods of controlling neurons. For instance, electrical pulses stimulate all the neurons in a spot in the brain, not just desired cell types, while drugs act slowly. However, optogenetics has a number of drawbacks of its own. Light cannot penetrate deep past the skull or into the brain, so optogenetics typically requires invasive surgery to implant optical fibers near whatever neural circuits scientists want to illuminate.
Now neuroscientist Ali Güler, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and his colleagues have developed a genetic construct they named "Magneto" that can be inserted into neurons to make them sensitive to magnetic fields. They said their work achieved the first example of magnetic control of the nervous system using genetic engineering. The researchers detailed their findings online March 7 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The scientists based their design on a molecule known as TRPV4, a protein that can let calcium ions into cells. Calcium ions can help trigger nerve impulses.
Read more:
https://www.insidescience.org/content/magneto-protein-could-help-magnets-control-brain-circuitry/3746
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