Scientists at UCL and the Allen Institute in Seattle have built a brain probe that does two jobs at once: recording the electrical chatter of hundreds of individual neurons deep in the brain while using light to switch specific cells on or off. The device, called Neuropixels Opto, was tested in mice and described in the journal Nature Methods.
Until now, those two capabilities have lived in separate instruments. Electrophysiology captures what neurons are doing electrically; optogenetics, which combines genetics and optics, lets researchers control targeted cells. Combining them in one probe means a researcher can nudge a particular set of neurons and watch, in the same moment and the same tissue, how the surrounding circuit responds.
That matters for Alzheimer's research because the disease is fundamentally a disorder of neural circuits going wrong, and the researchers point to Alzheimer's and schizophrenia among the conditions the technology could help illuminate. Understanding how individual cells interact within a circuit - rather than inferring it from separate experiments - is the kind of groundwork that eventually informs where and how to intervene.
This is a tool, not a treatment, and the work so far has been done in mice. It is part of a 15 million pound international project funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Allen Institute and other partners to develop Neuropixels probe technology, so the practical test will be what other labs manage to learn with it.