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.
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.
Photostimulation is the use of light to artificially activate biological compounds, cells, tissues, or even whole organisms. Photostimulation can be used to noninvasively probe various relationships between different biological processes, using only light. In the long run, photostimulation has the potential for use in different types of therapy, such as migraine headache. Additionally, photostimulation may be used for the mapping of neuronal connections between different areas of the brain by “uncaging” signaling biomolecules with light. Therapy with photostimulation has been called light therapy, phototherapy, or photobiomodulation.
Halorhodopsin is a seven-transmembrane retinylidene protein from microbial rhodopsin family. It is a chloride-specific light-activated 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, a light-gated 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.
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 with Retinitis pigmentosa.
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.
The Massry Prize was established in 1996, and was administered by the Meira and Shaul G. Massry Foundation until 2019. The Prize, of $40,000 and the Massry Lectureship, is bestowed upon scientists who have made substantial recent contributions in the biomedical sciences. Shaul G. Massry, M.D., who established the Massry Foundation, is Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Physiology and Biophysics at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California. He served as Chief of its Division of Nephrology from 1974 to 2000. In 2009 the KECK School of Medicine was asked to administer the Prize, and has done so since that time. Ten winners of the Massry Prize have gone on to be awarded a Nobel Prize.
Feng Zhang is a Chinese–American biochemist. Zhang currently holds the James and Patricia Poitras Professorship in Neuroscience at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and in the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also has appointments with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is most well known for his central role in the development of optogenetics and CRISPR technologies.
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.
Kay M. Tye is an American neuroscientist and professor and Wylie Vale Chair in the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. Her research has focused on using optogenetics to identify connections in the brain that are involved in innate emotion, motivation and social behaviors.
Boris Valery Zemelman is an American neuroscientist who is one of the pioneers of optogenetics.
The Jacob and Louise Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine or Gabbay Award is an annual prize established in 1998 by the Jacob and Louise Gabbay Foundation to recognize outstanding work in the biomedical sciences. The award is administered by the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and is worth $15,000. The winner also receives a medal and delivers a lecture on his or her work.
Anion-conducting channelrhodopsins are light-gated ion channels that open in response to light and let negatively charged ions enter a cell. All channelrhodopsins use retinal as light-sensitive pigment, but they differ in their ion selectivity. Anion-conducting channelrhodopsins are used as tools to manipulate brain activity in mice, fruit flies and other model organisms (Optogenetics). Neurons expressing anion-conducting channelrhodopsins are silenced when illuminated with light, an effect that has been used to investigate information processing in the brain. For example, suppressing dendritic calcium spikes in specific neurons with light reduced the ability of mice to perceive a light touch to a whisker. Studying how the behavior of an animal changes when specific neurons are silenced allows scientists to determine the role of these neurons in the complex circuits controlling behavior.
Christian T. Wentz is an American electrical engineer and entrepreneur. He is recognized for his work in engineering authenticity in electronic devices and the use of these primitives in distributed systems, developing neural interface technologies and innovation in optoelectronics, low power circuit design, wireless power and high bandwidth communication technologies.
Zhuo-Hua Pan is a Chinese-American neuroscientist, known for his foundational contributions to optogenetics. He is the Edward T. and Ellen K. Dryer Endowed Professor of Ophthalmology at Wayne State University, and Scientific Director of the Ligon Research Center of Vision at the university's Kresge Eye Institute.
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.
Ernst Bamberg is a German biophysicist and director emeritus of the Department of Biophysical Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics.
Lisa Gunaydin is an American neuroscientist and assistant professor at the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California San Francisco. Gunaydin helped discover optogenetics in the lab of Karl Deisseroth and now uses this technique in combination with neural and behavioral recordings to probe the neural circuits underlying emotional behaviors.
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.
