{"id":1989,"date":"2018-07-02T12:32:39","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T19:32:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bioe.uw.edu\/yazdan-azadeh\/?post_type=news&p=1989"},"modified":"2018-07-02T12:36:14","modified_gmt":"2018-07-02T19:36:14","slug":"our-paper-titled-targeted-cortical-reorganization-using-optogenetics-in-non-human-primates-was-published-in-elife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bioe.uw.edu\/yazdan-azadeh\/our-paper-titled-targeted-cortical-reorganization-using-optogenetics-in-non-human-primates-was-published-in-elife\/","title":{"rendered":"Our paper titled: “Targeted cortical reorganization using optogenetics in non-human primates” was published in eLife."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"eLifeOur paper titled: “Targeted cortical reorganization using optogenetics in non-human primates<\/a>” was published in eLife.<\/h3>\n

From eLife digest:<\/p>\n

From riding a bike to reaching for a cup of coffee, all skilled actions rely on precise connections between the sensory and motor areas of the brain. While sensory areas receive and analyse input from the senses, motor areas plan and trigger muscle contractions. Precisely adjusting the connections between these and other areas enables us to learn new skills, and it also helps us to relearn skills lost as a result of brain injury or stroke.<\/p>\n

About 70 years ago, a psychologist named Donald Hebb came up with an idea for how this process might occur. He proposed that whenever two neurons are active at the same time, the connection between them becomes stronger. This idea, that \u2018cells that fire together, wire together\u2019, became known as Hebb\u2019s rule. Many studies have since shown that Hebb\u2019s rule can explain changes in the strength of connections between pairs of neurons. But can it also explain how connections between entire brain regions become stronger or weaker?<\/p>\n

New results show that it can. The data were obtained using a technique called optogenetics, in which viruses are used to introduce genes for light-sensitive proteins into neurons. Shining light onto the brain will then activate any cells within that area that contain the resulting proteins. Yazdan-Shahmorad, Silversmith et al. used this technique to activate small regions of either sensory or motor brain tissue in live macaque monkeys. Doing so strengthened the overall connectivity between the two areas. The effects were more variable at the level of smaller brain regions, with some connections becoming weaker rather than stronger. However, Yazdan-Shahmorad, Silversmith et al. show that Hebb\u2019s rule explains most of the observed changes.<\/p>\n

Many neurological and psychiatric disorders stem from abnormal brain connectivity. Simple forms of brain stimulation are already used to treat certain neurological disorders, such as Parkinson\u2019s disease. Stimulating the brain to induce specific changes in connectivity may ultimately enable us to leverage the brain\u2019s natural learning mechanisms to cure, instead of just treat, these conditions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our paper titled: “Targeted cortical reorganization using optogenetics in non-human primates” was published in eLife.
\nBrain stimulation modulates the excitability of neural circuits and drives neuroplasticity. While the local effects of stimulation have been an active area of investigation, the effects on large-scale networks remain largely unexplored. We studied stimulation-induced changes in network dynamics in two macaques. A large-scale optogenetic interface enabled simultaneous stimulation of excitatory neurons and electrocorticographic recording across primary somatosensory (S1) and motor (M1) cortex (Yazdan-Shahmorad et al., 2016). We tracked two measures of network connectivity, the network response to focal stimulation and the baseline coherence between pairs of electrodes; these were strongly correlated before stimulation. Within minutes, stimulation in S1 or M1 significantly strengthened the gross functional connectivity between these areas. At a finer scale, stimulation led to heterogeneous connectivity changes across the network. These changes reflected the correlations introduced by stimulation-evoked activity, consistent with Hebbian plasticity models. This work extends Hebbian plasticity models to large-scale circuits, with significant implications for stimulation-based neurorehabilitation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1988,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bioe.uw.edu\/yazdan-azadeh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bioe.uw.edu\/yazdan-azadeh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bioe.uw.edu\/yazdan-azadeh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bioe.uw.edu\/yazdan-azadeh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bioe.uw.edu\/yazdan-azadeh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bioe.uw.edu\/yazdan-azadeh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bioe.uw.edu\/yazdan-azadeh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bioe.uw.edu\/yazdan-azadeh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bioe.uw.edu\/yazdan-azadeh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bioe.uw.edu\/yazdan-azadeh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}