2-Channel SpikerBox Now Available. Measure Neuron Speed in Earthworms.
We hereby announce our 2-Channel SpikerBox. What can you do with it? Why, you can measure the speed of spikes as they travel down a nerve, in a truly “backyard” preparation using Earthworms. See our full experiment write up on how to do it! How fast is a spike? Faster than a car, faster than a plane, faster than a speeding bullet? Find out!
Backyard Brains Returns to the Nature Neuroscience Podcast, unveils Optogenetics Prototype
Coming to the Society for Neuroscience meeting is always great fun for us, and it was especially true this year as we unveiled the third generation of our optogenetic prototype and actually did some experiments at our poster! Earlier this year we sponsored a student design effort to build a portable optogenetic rig using cholinergic ChR2 (Channelrhodopsin) transgenic fruitfles from our collaborator Stefan Pulver. We’ve been hard at work over the summer improving the prototype with two design cycles, and here is version 3.
We brought the prototype to SfN; Stefan brought the special flies. Here at Backyard Brains we believe in real-time posters, so if you came by, you would seen us explaining how the prototype worked while Stefan was busy preparing the fruitfly larva for recording. Below Nature reporter Ewen Callaway talks to Stefan as he tries to use our micro-rig.
Ewen subsequently wrote a nice blog post on our gear for the Nature News site, but the best treat of all for us was returning to “Neuropod,” the Nature Neuroscience podcast. We were on the podcast three years ago when we first tried to present our gear and nothing worked. But we kept hacking away, and now, with all our gear fully operational, we were happy to bring the first spikes recorded live on Neuropod!
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As astute listener may wonder why you only hear the standard cockroach leg spikes on the podcast. Where are the fruitfly muscle recordings? Weren’t we also talking about some optogenetic device? Show the data! We admit, it was still relatively early in the day when we spoke with Ewen, and Stefan was still trying to get his dissection right (he remarked the monocular microscope made the dissection difficult, and he would have preferred the gooseneck dissection lights to be longer. Noted for Gen4). But Stefan stayed focused, and at 2 PM Sunday afternoon we successfully recorded the critical piece of data: the electromyogram from the fruitfly muscle during presentation of blue light. It’s noisy, but in the recording below you can hear the increased activity from the muscle at ~2 seconds when Stefan turned on the blue light. The blue light caused the cholinergic motor neurons to depolarize, resulting in muscle contraction.
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Expect us to release the designs for the micromanipulator (you could 3D print it yourself!) and LED control circuit in a month or so.
It was a busy SfN for us, as we also ran a symposium on “Low Cost Neuroscience” with our colleagues Bruce Johnson from Cornell, Jeff Wilson from Albion, a high school teacher from the D.C. area, Raddy Ramos from New York Institute of Technology, our friend Stefan, and our keynote speaker Ben Robbins, a 6th grader from Novi Meadows Middle School. Mr. Robbins taught the audience how to successfully do outreach to 5th graders. We don’t have access to age data of presenters at SfN, but we would venture to guess Mr. Robbins may have been the youngest presenter ever for the society.
Scientists, with their huge intellect and famous experiments, can sometimes be intimidating to approach. Thus, we were a bit cautious and sheepish when we asked Mr. Robbins if he would let us take a picture with him. Thankfully, he was cool with it.
Photo by Jeff Wilson
You can watch Mr. Robbins’ talk below in all its lo-fi hand held camera glory. Don’t worry, the shaking slows down about 20 seconds in.
Our good friend Moheb Costandi also wrote a detailed summary of the symposium for the Dana Foundation. Stay tuned in the months to come as we release more inventions!
Thanks to FundScience for Helping Us Sponsor an Optogenetics Design Project
Thanks to all who donated! The mission of FundScience is to get the public directly involved in funding scientific enterprise, so, of course, where did the $512.20 we raised actually go? Did it dump right into indirect costs? No way! Our organization develops low-cost neurotechnology, and the support of FundScience helped enable the building of an optogenetics prototype for a senior final design project we sponsored at the University of Michigan. What is optogenetics? It’s an exciting technology, developed in the early 2000′s, of stimulating neurons with light. The neurons in fruit flies and mice are modified using genetic engineering techniques, and the creatures have light-sensitive ion channels. It’s a rather useful technology (just ask any neuroscientist), but to date has only been available at advanced research institutions. But because of you, not anymore. We have made preliminary inroads towards making optogenetics a tool even high school students can use!
For our prototype to allow portable demonstrations of optogenetics in transgenic fruit flies, we needed a neuroamplifier, a micromanipulator, a microscope, and LED light controller. Backyard Brains has its own amplifier (the SpikerBox), and we decided to go with an off-the-shelf inexpensive microscope rather than design our own optics. Thus, our design efforts focused on the manipulator, the LED control, and the biological preparation. We worked with five seniors in biomedical engineering (Emily, Zack, Nick, John, and Sharon, all from Southeastern Michigan) over about 12 weeks. We are happy to report we were successful in building a functional prototype that we then tested with scientist Stefan Pulver of Cornell University/University of Cambridge.Here is a picture of the prototype.
On April 17th, we successfully recorded EMG’s (electromyograms) from channelrhodopsin-2 expressing fruit flies using the prototype we built. These flies have ChR expressed in their glutamatergic neurons, and when blue light is flashed upon them, the muscles in their body wall contract. Using the manipulator to place the electrode on the exposed muscle, the microscope to view the dissection, the amplifier to record EMGs, and the LED controller to flash light, we had a fully contained optogenetics rig. Below you can listen to an audio recording of light-evoked EMG. It’s noisy, but you can hear the response!
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Here are the students posing with their invention!
For our second prototype, which we are currently working on, we will increase the stability of the manipulator by combining the y and x-axis with the z-axis of the manipulator. We also need to improve the iPhone application that controls the LED. The biggest weakness of our design is more biological than mechanical; the Drosophila dissection takes expertise to do well. Once the stability improves, we will begin demoing this unit to high schools. We have actually already begun demonstrations of the behavioral responses of transgenic fruit flies to blue light. See below for some investigation by students at Winans Academy in Detroit.
We thank all the donators who contributed to this project, the hard working senior design students, and our colleague Stefan Pulver for providing the fruit flies, time, and expertise. We are bootstrapping the continued development; the work continues! Below is the exact cost breakdown of the use of the funds.
The SpikerBox - provides a great way to learn about how the brain works by letting you hear and even see the electrical impulses of neurons! The SpikerBox is now available... Order yours today!
