Over the past 10 years, the development and convergence of microbial opsin engineering,
modular genetic methods for cell-type targeting and optical strategies for guiding light …

Modern optogenetics can be tuned to evoke activity that corresponds to naturally occurring
local or global activity in timing, magnitude or individual-cell patterning. This outcome has …

Electrically excitable cells are important in the normal functioning and in the
pathophysiology of many biological processes. These cells are typically embedded in …

Social interaction is a complex behavior essential for many species and is impaired in major
neuropsychiatric disorders. Pharmacological studies have implicated certain …

Obtaining high-resolution information from a complex system, while maintaining the global
perspective needed to understand system function, represents a key challenge in biology …

Our understanding of the cellular implementation of systems-level neural processes like
action, thought and emotion has been limited by the availability of tools to interrogate …

Severe behavioural deficits in psychiatric diseases such as autism and schizophrenia have
been hypothesized to arise from elevations in the cellular balance of excitation and …

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a therapeutic option for intractable neurological and
psychiatric disorders, including Parkinson's disease and major depression. Because of the …

Neural circuits of the basal ganglia are critical for motor planning and action selection,,. Two
parallel basal ganglia pathways have been described, and have been proposed to exert …

Ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neurons have important roles in adaptive and
pathological brain functions related to reward and motivation. However, it is unknown …