Nina Vogt

Voltage sensors: challenging, but with potential

Genetically encoded voltage sensors are coming of age, but their use still poses challenges that must be addressed from multiple angles.

Neuroscience: fMRI goes individual

Functional magnetic resonance data are traditionally analyzed on a population level, but new work shows that meaningful information can be extracted from individual subjects.

Sensors and probes: Visualizing voltage

Two recently developed genetically encoded voltage sensors allow scientists to image the activity of defined neuronal populations.

Cell biology: Sensing some tension

Cells are under mechanical tension in their native environment. New genetically encoded tension sensors can make a broader range of these forces visible.

Neuroscience: All-optical electrophysiology in behaving animals

Three different optical strategies enable the manipulation and imaging of neural activity in awake mice.

NEUROSCIENCE: Pressuring neurons into action.

An alternative to optogenetics, sonogenetics uses ultrasound to mechanically stimulate neurons.

Neuroscience: Putting a stamp on single cells

approach in a variety of examples involving different viruses and target cells. In one example, they expressed a genetically encoded calcium indicator in single cells in the brain of a mouse and determined the cells’ orientation tuning in response to visual stimuli. In the future, Roska and Müller want to continue developing the technology. Roska thinks that they can further improve the efficiency of the technology and maybe even automate it. Furthermore, he wants to target cells in deeper brain regions without relying on imaging-based guidance. Instead, he thinks about combining the technology with optogenetic identification of target cells, which involves channelrhodopsin expression, illumination and electrical recording from candidate cells before they are targeted by virus stamping. Nina Vogt

Modeling temperature during optogenetic illumination

With their ability to introduce single-base changes without cutting both strands of the DNA base, editors are the rising stars in the CRISPR portfolio. The past two years have seen advances in on-target activity, but targeting editors to a specific base while leaving those in the vicinity unchanged is still a challenge. For a C-to-T edit, a Cas9 nickase is fused to a cytidine deaminase, most commonly rat APOBEC1, and a uracil DNA glycosylase inhibitor that prevents repair of the edited base. To narrow the specificity of the base editor to a single C within the editing window, Gehrke et al. used human APOBEC3A, which requires a TCA/G motif for editing and hardly edits Cs in other sequence contexts. Independently, Wang et al. also found that human APOBEC3A has a narrower editing window and efficiently converts Cs to Ts in regions with high DNA methylation levels. NR

Neuroscience: It takes two to trans -Tango

Trans-Tango allows trans-synaptic mapping of presynaptic and postsynaptic partners in Drosophila.

Delighting in dopamine

The genetically encoded sensor dLight1 reports dopamine release in culture, slices and behaving mice.