SCIENTISTS at the University of St Andrews have discovered that the lighting used in smartphone displays can be used an innovative way to understand how the brain works.
Professor Malte Gather from the School of Physics and Astronomy and his team have found that the flashes of light can activate live cells that are genetically programmed to respond to light.
He said the discovery could help pave the way to helping scientists better understand and treat what causes devastating neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease and Motor Neurone Disease.
Scientists say that a network of around 100 billion neurons power the human brain, and figuring out how they work together has always been a monumental task.
Prof Gather says that despite advances in science, we still do not understand how our brains work on a very basic level.
As a result while hundreds of millions of people suffer from neurological diseases, treatment methods and drugs are currently very limited.
Neurons, or brain cells, can be turned on and off with light. Typically, neuroscientists using this "optogenetics" technique shine light on a region of the brain through implanted optical fibres and record the response with a second device. This helps to reveal which regions of the brain are responsible for which behaviour.
Working with Dr Gareth Miles from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, Professor Gather and his team used organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) used in mobile phones to manipulate individual, live cells from a human embryonic kidney cell group that were tweaked to produce a light-sensitive protein.
Upon exposure to the blue OLED light from pixels directly underneath the cell, the electric activity of individual targeted cells was stimulated, while neighbouring cells remained in the dark and stayed inactive.
Their goal is to apply the technology to activate individual neurons or groups of neurons, which would facilitate new ways of studying the cells' function in the lab and ultimately advance knowledge of the neuronal dysfunction.
The group said the results suggest that OLEDs are an ideal platform technology for investigating and controlling the biological processes.
Professor Gather said: "Over the course of the past ten years or so neurobiologists have developed a method to get neurons, the cells in our brain, to become sensitive to light. It means that essentially you can trigger a thought process or activity in the cells in our brain by just shining light of them.
"That's something that for a neurobiologist is the ultimate dream because now you can study how the brain works in an experiment where you activate the single cell in the brain and see what the brain does. You have a way to control the behaviour of the brain and therefore study it better.
"We need to have experiments so we can learn through cause and effect, by pushing one button to see what happens. This technology which is optogenetics, is the technology that allows us to do it.
"However, providing the light to the cells in the brain hasn't quite kept pace with the genetic technology of making the brain cells light sensitive, and we figured that the light-emitting components of smartphone displays, may be very well suited to do this."
He said the research demonstrates that they can now take adapted smartphone OLEDs and by turning on one of the pixels provide light to one cell and then activate it to observe its response.
“Using a miniature version of the OLED displays used in modern smartphones, we can now expose individual cells to light and thereby activate them in a controlled fashion," he added.
"The end game is going to be to reach further into medical applications," he said. "Once you understand things better you could think of a patient who suffers from epilepsy or Parkinson's, brain disease where the neurones go mad and are hyperactive, and you could use those light sources to control certain neurones in the brain so that the seizure comes to a halt.
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