Unlocking the mystery of how the brain sees : paving the way for visual impairment cures

3D holographic restitution of the brains’s activity with single-neuron resolution.

Working together, they have improved current state-of-the-art microscopy to allow them, not only to trace a single neuron’s activity, but also to manipulate them using optogenetics. « The ability to perturb or manipulate the flow of excitation and inhibition is essential for elucidating causal relationships between neurons, and thus their role in health and disease, says the holder of the Chair. To achieve this, we’ve reflected on how to use sculpted light and optogenetics to turn on and off one or multiple neurons at a time with single cell precision and millisecond temporal precision»

What they have come up with is a holographic microscope, which can send targeted light into a brain slice, or a mouse’s brain. This approach combined with optogenetics enables to precisely control and manipulate the activation of neurons in a brain circuits. « We’re going to use this new technology to investigate the mechanisms regulating connectivity and signal processing across the main visual pathways (retina, lateral geniculate nucleus, primary visual cortex) with unprecedent spatial precision and temporal resolution. ». The long-term prospective is to bring to light the complete designs and global architecture of vision, reaching «full visual circuit reverse engineering», as the project puts it. « The technology that we will demonstrate, says Dr. Valentina Emiliani, will ultimately open up the possibility to “play the brain like a piano”, a dream that will enable scientists to understand how a specific pattern of activity contributes to brain computations, and vision processing ».