Abstract
Optogenetics has revolutionized the experimental interrogation of neural circuits in the past decade and holds potential for the treatment of neurological disorders. However, optogenetic stimulation of deep brain neurons requires the insertion of invasive optical fibers because the activating blue-green light cannot penetrate deep inside brain tissue. Here we describe a minimally invasive technique for the stimulation of deep brain neurons by transcranial near-infrared light (NIR), where upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) are used as optogenetic actuators to locally convert NIR into visible light. We detail the protocol to use locally injected UCNPs to stimulate dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of anesthetized mice by transcranial NIR.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by Human Frontier Science Program Postdoctoral Fellowship (LT 000579/201) (S.C.), JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Postdoctoral Fellowship (16F16386) (S.C.), RIKEN Special Postdoctoral Researchers Program (S.C.), Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists from MEXT (the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan) (16K18373, 18K14857) (S.C.), RIKEN Incentive Research Project Grant for Individual Germinating Research (S.C.), Narishige Neuroscience Research Foundation Grant (S.C.), and Nakatani Foundation Grant Program (S.C.).
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Chen, S. (2020). Near-infrared Deep Brain Stimulation in Living Mice . In: Niopek, D. (eds) Photoswitching Proteins . Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2173. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0755-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0755-8_4
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