Published on July 26, 2013 at 7:43 AM
The researchers also tweaked certain GCaMPs to be sensitive to different types of calcium ion concentrations, meaning that high rates of neural activity can be better explored. "Each probe is sensitive to one range or another, but when we put them together they make a nice choir," Wang said.
The researchers' work also revealed the location of a "bottleneck" in GCaMPs that occurs when calcium concentration is high, which poses a third limitation of the existing sensors, Wang said. "Now that we know where that bottle neck is, we think we can design the next generation of proteins to get around it," Wang said. "We think if we open up that bottleneck, we can get a probe that responds to neuronal signals in one millisecond."
The faster protein that the Princeton researchers developed could pair with work in other laboratories to improve other areas of GCaMP function, Wang said. For instance, a research group out of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute reported in Nature July 17 that it developed a GCaMP with a brighter fluorescence. Such improvements on existing sensors gradually open up more of the brain to exploration and understanding, said Wang, adding that the Princeton researchers will soon introduce their sensor into fly and mammalian brains.
"At some level, what we've done is like taking apart an engine, lubing up the parts and putting it back together. We took what was the best version of the protein at the time and made changes to the letter code of the protein," Wang said. "We want to watch the whole symphony of thousands of neurons do their thing, and we think this variant of GCaMPs will help us do that better than anyone else has."
Source: Princeton University