Optogenetics is one of the "technologies" we're using in the Bordeaux IGEM Team's project.
In this post, I'm going to try and simplify an article I read in newscientist, adding in my own ideas along the way, to:
- present to you what Optogenetics is,
- How voles fall in love, and how to
seize control and conquer the world using our new Vole Armyunderstand the process. - What applications I see Optogenetics being used for in the future.
Source: Pama E.A. Claudia, Colzato Lorenza, Hommel Bernhard -
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00610/full
Let's first introduce what optogenetics is, so we're all on the same page.
(in case you don't know what genetics is... Go practice your Google-fu, young Padawan !)
Optogenetics, in it's simplest form, is modifying a gene to be able to selectively express it (turn it into a protein) if you expose it to a specific wavelength of light (red, blue, green, infrared...).
It's an amazingly simple concept, yet it opens the door for a lot of applications.
Everything from restoring sight in the blind, mind-controlled gene expression, to overcoming the urge to sleep at will and, the object of the rest of this post, making voles fall in love.
source: Todd Ahern, Emory University
Yep, you read that title right.
To be honest, Newscientist is a vulgarisation journal, meaning it puts a certain "spin" on their titles to make them more impactful and interesting. So it's a little more complicated than just a switch. But it's still quite fascinating !
So, let's start our story !
A team at Emory University, Atlanta, decided to study the underlying mechanism behind pair-bonding in voles, who mate for life.
They wanted to know what parts of the brain were implicated, and if they could manipulate the process. (mainly to prove that they were, indeed, the right parts of the brain they had identified, I imagine).
They first implanted electrodes into the brains of female voles to observe what happened inside their brains when they meet males, and what leads to pair-bonding.
They discovered that parts of the brain were more active during the mating and pair-bonding activities than at other times.
More specifically (and in science-speak):
rhythmic oscillations of groups of neurons in the prefrontal cortex – an area of the brain involved in decision-making and
executive functions – controlled the strength of oscillations in neurons of the neighbouring nucleus accumbens, an area
involved in pleasure, reward and addiction
Here's another little quote to bring home the point they're trying to make about the importance of this connection:
physical features of the male [...]become stamped into the reward system, meaning partners become “rewards” in themselves.
Gives a new spin to the saying "the pleasure of your company", doesn't it !
Now we get to the juicy part, where the Optogenetics come into play !
The researchers wanted to test if they could activate this circuit themselves, so they integrated modified genes, that could be activated by light, into the areas of the prefrontal cortex of the female voles, that were excited during their observations, and put the female voles in close proximity with male voles, but without allowing them to mate or interact.
During this proximity period (they could, I assume, still smell, hear and see each other), they stimulated the brains of the female voles in the test group with the same rhythmic oscillations as they had observed during pair-bonding/mating.
They then presented the female voles with 2 males. One they had interacted with during the stimulation, and a stranger.
Of the 12 voles, 10 preferred males they had been "stimulated" with.
For the control group, in which 12 female voles had an irrelevant gene stimulated (I assume to make sure the act of stimulation and the brain surgery itself wasn't a factor in the choice) during their period with a male. Only 3 choose the male they'd been exposed to before.
Interesting, isn't it.
What can we learn from this ?
Well, first of all, a warning for the ladies :
Don't let a man implant electrodes in your brain,
he might just be trying to manipulate you into becoming his lifelong mate ! ;)
But most of all we can see the potential this technology has.
Given its superb temporal (light is pretty fast at getting to its target) and spatial (we can target individual genes) resolution, it's open to a lot of big, as well as precise, possibilities.
This part is complete supposition, based on nothing but the most basic of facts (AKA., the definition of optogenetics at the beginning of this article).
But don't worry, most of my friends say my best feature is my nearly boundless imagination !
So, there are a lot of possible ways to use and misuse optogenetics.
Let me make a small list of positive, then negative ways I imagine this technology/method could be misused. Some will have a bit of argumentation, others I'll just throw out there, so you can wrap your head around them !
Positive applications of optogenetics:
Augmenting our visual spectrum. By adding more of the proteins that allow us to perceive different colors, modified to perceive things like infrared or X-rays, our brain should actually be able to just interpret the signals coherently and add it to the rest as part of the visual system. of course, that's only a theory.
Limb regeneration. As mentioned in my post introducing our IGEM project one possible application would be to regerenate limbs. Mainly by using the light to control which cell differentiates into what at the exact time and placement needed to ensure we don't grow a new arm entirely composed of skin... That... would be a bit embarrassing for the doctor to explain.
Tattoos that change based on light conditions.
Negative uses of optogenetics:
Assassination. inject someone with a poison contained within a bacteria that will only release it under very specific light conditions. Make it when all the lights are off and make it a poison that induces a heart attack, and you've got a "passed away in his sleep" death.
Memory erasing. "please look at this" ZAP. a dictatorship could potentially engineer people at birth so as to have their recent memories erased whenever submitted to a special wavelength of light. The Military police would then only need to flash any witnesses if they take out a protester and voila, no witnesses. more sinister would be having a "switch" that just destroys the brain from the inside if it's thrown.
Source for article and pictures:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133227-brain-switch-in-voles-makes-them-fall-in-love-at-first-sight/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/30793552@N04/7523368472
Thanks! So much new interesting information. I dont really get the part with augmenting visual spectrum. Sure you can probably change perception of colors to see them differently, more vivid etc but how can optogenics help you get an x-ray vision?
Excellent question!
Seeing as the mind is very flexible in the data it interprets (some humans can echolocate, as a replacement for sight, for example) I believe one would only need to devise a structure similar enough to the cones in the eyes that provide us with sight, but reacting to exposition of X rats or infrared, and sending signals through the optic nerve like the other cones.
Course, this is a theory.
You got me interested but Im still thinking about that x-ray vision idea :D Sure, echolocation is possible with blind people but thats because we already have that skill. They just managed to intensify it and learned to process the information better. You can already tell where the sound is comming from and you can hear different reverbs of defferent spaces aka sound bouncing back from surfaces.
But x-ray vision is a different beast! We can only see narrow spectrum of visible light which cant go through objects. UV and IR are not doing any better. There were experiments in which they made retina of mices react to infra red thanks to chlorophyll so they gave them temporary "nightvision". But if you want rays to go through objects you are left with radiowaves or gamma. The two extremes on opposite sides of spectrum. Since there cant be any external device emitting these rays the question is how much gamma is around us already.. and even if there was... solid objects tend to absorb smaller doses of radiation rather than it would just fly straight through.
Anyway, thanks for an interesting theme :D
Hmmmm... OK.
You got me there. Xray vusion does seem to be rather imposdible to establish like that.
And were not even talking about the effect enough radiation to set it off would have on the rest of the organism XS
No problemo. Its always a joy talking about interesting science 😊
Have you ever watched a show called "The 100"?
This sounds like a potential storyline for the next season.
No, havent watched it...yet.
Its the one about 100 teens supposed to repopulate the earth, isnt it ?
What part are you referring to ?
That's the one. It's available on Netflix. Another good one is Helix, but it got cancelled after season 2. Both have interesting genetic modification themes.
Nice, thanks for the recommendations !
I love learning about genetic engineering and seeing the human imagination spring to life, so I'm sure it'll be interesting watching those shows :)
Next season ? shouldnt be all dead but a few due to the radiation storm ? :D
I dunno...I'm still on season 2, but they just confirmed the next season is coming in 2018, so I guess I'll find out lol
uhh sorry, since you talked about next season I assumed I watched it all
No problem! I can't even remember my grocery list, so there's no way this spoils anything for me
ahhhh thats why you are interested in optogenetics, to see if you can improve your memory. Very clever
Oh, I'm sure optigenetics has great potential to help people with neurodegenerative disorders and the array of debilitating symptoms that accompany them. But who doesn't love a good dystopian fantasy plot where the line between antagony and protagony is a muddled mess of medical ethics debate?
Wow that is very interesting. Since you can erase memories, could it potentially also be used for rewriting, and adding new memories?
Thanks !
Hmmm...
That would be way too complex for a simple optogenetic circuit, but if you use the optogenetic "switch" as a detector, and combine it with, say, a microchip implanted in the memory centers of the brain capable of taking "snapshots" of all the important parts of memory, reverting to previous snapshots to erase memories, simulating the addition of new details to a snapshot to add them.
Modifying would be... more complex.
It would require, I believe, a full understanding of how the different parts of the memories are stored. Characters, emotions, etc...
You could potentially rewrite it, during sleep, by accessing it constantly and using the brain's capacity to rewrite memories in light of the emotional state during recall to, say, force the memory to be accessed while inducing an emotion of uncontrollable rage at the same time.
Though that kind of manipulation isn't exactly "subtle", and could wake a person up ?
In any case, the brain's good to go if you let it invents its own reasons for why it suddenly associates "rage" with, say, every memory you have of the current president.
Of course, this is all still a "theory"...and one supported mostly by my overactive mind and relative understanding of recent advances in neuroscience (I didn't take a Master in Neuroscience... though I could, after finishing the Bioinformatics one. Bordeaux has an entire Neurocampus and big fancy lab dedicated to it, if I find that interesting... hm....)
As far as I know, we've only recently uncovered the fact that neurons seem to be more than just gateways for processing information, and also store information chemically that alter how fast they transmit their signals, how many connections they can form, and many other characteristics...
All of those things altering how neural patterns form, how strong they are, and thus altering memory storage and a lot of other components of our "mental World".
This is all just supposition, but it's fascinating :)
That's very interesting. Thanks for the explanation! :D
Perhaps combining optogenics and this research could yield interesting results: http://www.futurity.org/mind-reading-complex-thoughts-1470242-2/
I already can see soldiers bonded with their army, no need to pay them, theyd do it for love..
That is a potential nefarious application, yes.
But to manipulate the love circuitry specifically for a cause, you'd either need a very complex optogenetic assembly...
or just go the easier way and implant an electrode into the brain of the soldiers that stimulate the reward system positively when the nanocomputer hears talk of the "mother country", or sacrificing yourself life for it, and causes anger when hearing about the enemy.
It's very close to Pavlovian Conditioning.
I don't think they'd need optogenetics... North Korea could literally do this now if they thought they needed to reinforce their already brainwashed troops.
I do believe "do it for your country, not the money" is pretty much how it already works in dictatorships that have a firm grasp on their citizen's lives and minds. No need for fancy new tech.
Of course you are right. Then again, apparently the heat of the battle makes the soldiers with some conscience get the heck out asap, some in surviving cowardice, others shocked and panicked. The step further to complete mission regardless of one´s life, very well could be accomplished with a little software/hardware combination. I mean one thing is creating super expensive supersoldiers and another cheap hardware addons for mass soldiers with clear beliefs that is not the addon, is them who are convinced.
But stop with all this war bullshit, the applications are so wide that the possibilities really depend more on the imagination to look for an specific application.
And thanks for the post, it should make all of us think a little more about what is really going on in the world.
OH wow amazing genetics is epigenetic! Got you on my SteemVoter RULES!!!
Technically this has nothing to do with epigenetics (Which is basically the extra components that decide our future without being part of DNA), but I'll take the compliment anyways ;)
Light changing genetic expression is environment changing genetic expression yes?
That.... is technically correct.
Huh, never thought of it like that.
That's the wikipedia definition of Epigenetics, and your right in that such a broad definition does include optogenetics in it.
Though I'm pretty sure some scientist are going to debate viciously for it being totally different Domains XS
But that's scientists for you... all wanting their domain to be more important XD