Optogenetics Relieves Depression in a Mouse Trial (Norman)

Optogenetics Relieves Depression in a Mouse Trial

    * By David Dobbs Email Author
    * November 30, 2010
    * 5:00 pm
    * Categories: Neuron Culture, Science Blogs
    * Wired magazine  

Forget about Area 51.  The action is at Area 25.

"...A team of researchers has used light to make a mouse’s brain run better and relieve the mouse’s mousy version of depression....This optogenetic work suggests a less intrusive, even more exacting way to test, define, and tweak...[brain] circuits.

"The researchers, led by Stanford University’s Karl Deisseroth and UT Southwestern psychiatrist Eric Nestler, used optogenetics — a technique that makes specific neurons sensitive to light and then lets you use light to activate or silence them — to increase activity in a key part of a mouse’s prefrontal cortex.

"As the researchers put it,

"...[O]ptogenetic stimulation of mPFC exerted potent antidepressant-like effects, without affecting general locomotor activity, anxiety-like behaviors, or social memory. These results indicate that the activity of the mPFC is a key determinant of depression-like behavior, as well as antidepressant responses."

This is a line of research that has been yielding excellent results for some time. Read more HERE.



Comments

[Elatia Harris]

Well, Norman, I read the post you liked to on the Wired blog, and I'm afraid I stopped thinking when it went into how the mice experienced "social defeat" after repeated failed dominance play. It was all a bit too Dostoyevskian for me. If you have to first get the mouse down to tweak him, I'm not sure I prefer that, as a control, to a naturally depressed mouse. It seems to fit under the heading of creating an ailment the better to demonstrate a treatment. Perhaps the best treatment for the mouse was to allow him to experience the amount of "social success" -- and not more -- that attaches to being an un-tampered with rodent.

[Sujatha]

Elatia, if it is of any help, this article from 4 years back provides real-life examples of the effects of stimulating Area 25 in humans. It's linked to in the Wired article and is also written by Dobbs.
The new development is a technique for stimulating Area 25 without the use of bulky electrodes, using a combination of microbial light-sensitive proteins and microelectronics, now being tested in mice.

[Norman Costa]

Elatia, thanks for reading my post and commenting. The article is VERY important, in my view, for three reasons:

1. It demonstrates the reality of a neural substrate for depression, albeit mouse depression. Put another way, experience can alter the functioning of the brain which, in turn, changes behavior.

2. It debuts a new, non-invasive technique for stimulating Area 25. Surgically implanted electrodes are too obtrusive and maybe even unsightly. They would probably hurt, too.

3. Behavior, depressive reactions, can be changed without having to change experiences. This fact, alone, has the most far reaching (and scary) implications for humankind. For mousekind, it is unnecessary to spend enormous amounts of mouse time and mouse money running in the analytic wheel cage. Spending a couple of hours in a research lab under full spectrum light bulbs may be sufficient.

There is another benefit, though it may not be applicable to humans. If your pet mouse starts complaining about how mouse life sucks, especially around the holidays, you can have something concrete to suggest.

[Elatia Harris]

Norman, my mouse probably was feeling great until I called the exterminator. Certainly he had everything he wanted up to that point, and was full of nerve, too. Sujatha, this is important research, thanks for the link. What worries me is the possibility that interventions such as this will ultimately be used to make people -- depressed or not -- happy enough with insupportable conditions; if I can be made to endure a toxic marriage or a toxic job by having one of its effects -- depression -- tweaked, then I still think I'm better off leaving the marriage and/or job than being photochemically or electrochemically altered to negotiate it better. In people if not rodents, situational depressions are instructive as to how to live. Severe endogenous depression is another issue -- but for this to have a parallel in laboratory world, you would need to engineer something much more significant than repeated social defeat for a mouse.

[Ruchira]

Well said, Elatia. It is extremely important that we understand the difference or we will drink the Koolaid of unmitigated cheer... or the powers that be, will make us drink it. There is good reason why Congenital Analgesia is considered an affliction and not a blessing.