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Behavioral neuroscience, also known as biological psychology, biopsychology, or psychobiology, is the application of the principles of biology to the study of physiological, genetic, and developmental mechanisms of behavior in humans and other animals.
James Edward Rothman is an American biochemist. He is the Fergus F. Wallace Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Yale University, the Chairman of the Department of Cell Biology at Yale School of Medicine, and the Director of the Nanobiology Institute at the Yale West Campus. Rothman also concurrently serves as adjunct professor of physiology and cellular biophysics at Columbia University and a research professor at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London.
Channelrhodopsins are a subfamily of retinylidene proteins (rhodopsins) that function as light-gated ion channels. They serve as sensory photoreceptors in unicellular green algae, controlling phototaxis: movement in response to light. Expressed in cells of other organisms, they enable light to control electrical excitability, intracellular acidity, calcium influx, and other cellular processes. Channelrhodopsin-1 (ChR1) and Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) from the model organism Chlamydomonas reinhardtii are the first discovered channelrhodopsins. Variants that are sensitive to different colors of light or selective for specific ions have been cloned from other species of algae and protists.
Molecular neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience that observes concepts in molecular biology applied to the nervous systems of animals. The scope of this subject covers topics such as molecular neuroanatomy, mechanisms of molecular signaling in the nervous system, the effects of genetics and epigenetics on neuronal development, and the molecular basis for neuroplasticity and neurodegenerative diseases. As with molecular biology, molecular neuroscience is a relatively new field that is considerably dynamic.
Halorhodopsin is a seven-transmembrane retinylidene protein from microbial rhodopsin family. It is a chloride-specific light-gated ion pump found in archaea known as halobacteria. It is activated by green light wavelengths of approximately 578nm. Halorhodopsin also shares sequence similarity to channelrhodopsin, another light-driven ion channel.
Gero Andreas Miesenböck is an Austrian scientist. He is currently Waynflete Professor of Physiology and Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour (CNCB) at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Opsin-3 also known as encephalopsin or panopsin is a protein that, in humans, is encoded by the OPN3 gene. Alternative splicing of this gene results in multiple transcript variants encoding different protein isoforms.
Optogenetics is a biological technique to control the activity of neurons or other cell types with light. This is achieved by expression of light-sensitive ion channels, pumps or enzymes specifically in the target cells. On the level of individual cells, light-activated enzymes and transcription factors allow precise control of biochemical signaling pathways. In systems neuroscience, the ability to control the activity of a genetically defined set of neurons has been used to understand their contribution to decision making, learning, fear memory, mating, addiction, feeding, and locomotion. In a first medical application of optogenetic technology, vision was partially restored in a blind patient.
A monoamine releasing agent (MRA), or simply monoamine releaser, is a drug that induces the release of a monoamine neurotransmitter from the presynaptic neuron into the synapse, leading to an increase in the extracellular concentrations of the neurotransmitter. Many drugs induce their effects in the body and/or brain via the release of monoamine neurotransmitters, e.g., trace amines, many substituted amphetamines, and related compounds.
Edward S. Boyden is an American neuroscientist at MIT. He is the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, a faculty member in the MIT Media Lab and an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. In 2018 he was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He is recognized for his work on optogenetics. In this technology, a light-sensitive ion channel such as channelrhodopsin-2 is genetically expressed in neurons, allowing neuronal activity to be controlled by light. There were early efforts to achieve targeted optical control dating back to 2002 that did not involve a directly light-activated ion channel, but it was the method based on directly light-activated channels from microbes, such as channelrhodopsin, emerging in 2005 that turned out to be broadly useful. Optogenetics in this way has been widely adopted by neuroscientists as a research tool, and it is also thought to have potential therapeutic applications. Boyden joined the MIT faculty in 2007, and continues to develop new optogenetic tools as well as other technologies for the manipulation of brain activity. Previously, Boyden received degrees in electrical engineering, computer science, and physics from MIT. During high school, Boyden attended the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science.
Thomas Christian Südhof, ForMemRS, is a German-American biochemist known for his study of synaptic transmission. Currently, he is a professor in the school of medicine in the department of molecular and cellular physiology, and by courtesy in neurology, and in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.
Karl Alexander Deisseroth is an American scientist. He is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.
Peter Hegemann is a Hertie Senior Research Chair for Neurosciences and a Professor of Experimental Biophysics at the Department of Biology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. He is known for his discovery of channelrhodopsin, a type of ion channels regulated by light, thereby serving as a light sensor. This created the field of optogenetics, a technique that controls the activities of specific neurons by applying light. He has received numerous accolades, including the Rumford Prize, the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine, and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.
Magnetogenetics refers to a biological technique that involves the use of magnetic fields to remotely control cell activity.
Attila Losonczy is a Hungarian neuroscientist, Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University Medical Center. Losonczy's main area of research is on the relationship between neural networks and behavior, specifically with regard to learning in the hippocampus.
Genetically encoded voltage indicator is a protein that can sense membrane potential in a cell and relate the change in voltage to a form of output, often fluorescent level. It is a promising optogenetic recording tool that enables exporting electrophysiological signals from cultured cells, live animals, and ultimately human brain. Examples of notable GEVIs include ArcLight, ASAP1, ASAP3, Archons, SomArchon, and Ace2N-mNeon.
Georg Nagel is a biophysicist and professor at the Department for Neurophysiology at the University of Würzburg in Germany. His research is focused on microbial photoreceptors and the development of optogenetic tools.
Priya Rajasethupathy is a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the Rockefeller University, leading the Laboratory of Neural Dynamics and Cognition.
Susana Q. Lima is a Portuguese neuroscientist and principal investigator at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. Her research studies neural mechanisms of sexual behavior and mate choice.
References
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- ↑ "Purification and characterization of a novel mammalian recombinase". WorldCat. March 3, 1997. OCLC 79601852.
- ↑ "Boris Zemelman". UT Texas. Retrieved December 26, 2015.
- ↑ Weber, T; Zemelman, BV; McNew, JA; Westermann, B; Gmachl, M; Parlati, F; Söllner, TH; Rothman, JE (20 March 1998). "SNAREpins: minimal machinery for membrane fusion". Cell. 92 (6): 759–72. doi: 10.1016/s0092-8674(00)81404-x . PMID 9529252.
- ↑ Zemelman, BV; Lee, GA; Ng, M; Miesenböck, G (3 January 2002). "Selective photostimulation of genetically chARGed neurons". Neuron. 33 (1): 15–22. doi: 10.1016/s0896-6273(01)00574-8 . PMID 11779476.
- ↑ Zemelman, BV; Nesnas, N; Lee, GA; Miesenbock, G (4 February 2003). "Photochemical gating of heterologous ion channels: remote control over genetically designated populations of neurons". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 100 (3): 1352–7. Bibcode:2003PNAS..100.1352Z. doi: 10.1073/pnas.242738899 . PMC 298776 . PMID 12540832.
- ↑ "2013 Nobel Prize Predictions". Understanding Animal Research. September 17, 2013. Retrieved December 26, 2015.
- ↑ "UT Austin Receives $4M to Develop Techniques for Brain Imaging & Manipulation'". UT News. October 2, 2015. Retrieved December 26, 2015.
- ↑ "Three brain research teams awarded $4 million from BRAIN Initiative". The Daily Texan. October 7, 2015. Archived from the original on July 6, 2017. Retrieved December 26, 2015.