When Edward Boyden was helping develop a tool to turn neurons on and off with light at Stanford a decade ago, he had a strong feeling it would spread far and wide. Even so, he’s been surprised by how ...

What the scientists had was a lab version of The Dog That Didn’t Bark — or, if Sherlock Holmes were chronicling the experiment, The Mice That Didn’t Freeze. One at a time, the 20 mice went into a ...

Scientists at Scripps Research Institute have created a groundbreaking method to track when brain cell activity decreases or switches off after a burst of activity using a combination of optogenetics ...

Optogenetics uses light to control neurons that have been made artificially sensitive to illumination. In the lab, scientists employ viruses to introduce genes for light-sensitive proteins into ...

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Optogenetics is a technique using a combination of optical and genetic methods. Optogenetic tools are targetable, genetically encoded proteins that enable the use of light to either report or control ...