Magneto-thermal genetic deep brain stimulation of motor behaviors in awake, freely moving mice
- University at Buffalo, United States
- Philipps University Marburg, Germany
- Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Abstract
Establishing how neurocircuit activation causes particular behaviors requires modulating the activity of specific neurons. Here, we demonstrate that magnetothermal genetic stimulation provides tetherless deep brain activation sufficient to evoke motor behavior in awake mice. The approach uses alternating magnetic fields to heat superparamagnetic nanoparticles on the neuronal membrane. Neurons heat-sensitized by expressing TRPV1 are activated with magnetic field application. Magnetothermal genetic stimulation in the motor cortex evoked ambulation, deep brain stimulation in the striatum caused rotation around the body-axis, and stimulation near the ridge between ventral and dorsal striatum caused freezing-of-gait. The duration of the behavior correlated tightly with field application. This approach provides genetically and spatially targetable, repeatable and temporarily precise activation of deep-brain circuits without need for surgical implantation of any device.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of Mental Health (1R01MH094730)
- Arnd Pralle
Human Frontier Science Program (RGP0052/2012)
- Arnd Pralle
National Institute of Mental Health (1R01MH111872)
- Arnd Pralle
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (PHY01051Y and PHY02103N) of the University at Buffalo. The protocol was approved by the Committee on the Ethics of Animal Experiments of the University at Buffalo. All surgery was performed andKetamine anesthesia, and every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Copyright
© 2017, Munshi et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 18,643
- views
-
- 2,086
- downloads
-
- 132
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Magneto-thermal genetic deep brain stimulation of motor behaviors in awake, freely moving mice
eLife 6:e27069.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.27069
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
The neurotransmitter dopamine helps form long-term memories by increasing the production of proteins through a unique signaling pathway.
-
- Neuroscience
Sensory signals from the body’s visceral organs (e.g. the heart) can robustly influence the perception of exteroceptive sensations. This interoceptive–exteroceptive interaction has been argued to underlie self-awareness by situating one’s perceptual awareness of exteroceptive stimuli in the context of one’s internal state, but studies probing cardiac influences on visual awareness have yielded conflicting findings. In this study, we presented separate grating stimuli to each of subjects’ eyes as in a classic binocular rivalry paradigm – measuring the duration for which each stimulus dominates in perception. However, we caused the gratings to ‘pulse’ at specific times relative to subjects’ real-time electrocardiogram, manipulating whether pulses occurred during cardiac systole, when baroreceptors signal to the brain that the heart has contracted, or in diastole when baroreceptors are silent. The influential ‘Baroreceptor Hypothesis’ predicts the effect of baroreceptive input on visual perception should be uniformly suppressive. In contrast, we observed that dominance durations increased for systole-entrained stimuli, inconsistent with the Baroreceptor Hypothesis. Furthermore, we show that this cardiac-dependent rivalry effect is preserved in subjects who are at-chance discriminating between systole-entrained and diastole-presented stimuli in a separate interoceptive awareness task, suggesting that our results are not dependent on conscious access to heartbeat sensations.
