{"id":86339,"date":"2019-01-02T15:42:21","date_gmt":"2019-01-02T23:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/controlling-neurons-with-light-but-without-wires-or-batteries"},"modified":"2019-01-02T15:42:21","modified_gmt":"2019-01-02T23:42:21","slug":"controlling-neurons-with-light-but-without-wires-or-batteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/controlling-neurons-with-light-but-without-wires-or-batteries","title":{"rendered":"Controlling neurons with light\u2014but without wires or batteries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/controlling-neurons-with-light-but-without-wires-or-batteries2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>University of Arizona biomedical engineering professor Philipp Gutruf is first author on the paper Fully implantable, optoelectronic systems for battery-free, multimodal operation in neuroscience research, published in Nature Electronics.<\/p>\n<p>Optogenetics is a biological technique that uses light to turn specific neuron groups in the <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/brain\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">brain<\/a> on or off. For example, researchers might use <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/optogenetic+stimulation\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">optogenetic stimulation<\/a> to restore movement in case of paralysis or, in the future, to turn off the areas of the brain or spine that cause pain, eliminating the need for\u2014and the increasing dependence on\u2014opioids and other painkillers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re making these tools to understand how different parts of the brain work,\u201d Gutruf said. \u201cThe advantage with optogenetics is that you have cell specificity: You can target specific groups of neurons and investigate their function and relation in the context of the whole brain.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2019-01-neurons-lightbut-wires-batteries.html\">https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2019&#45;01-neurons-lightbut-wires-batteries.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>University of Arizona biomedical engineering professor Philipp Gutruf is first author on the paper Fully implantable, optoelectronic systems for battery-free, multimodal operation in neuroscience research, published in Nature Electronics. Optogenetics is a biological technique that uses light to turn specific neuron groups in the brain on or off. For example, researchers might use optogenetic stimulation [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,412,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}