mouse with fiberopticOptogentics – Nature Magazine’s Method of the Year 2010

Optigenetics enables researchers to control particular cellular behaviors by light stimuli.

With this method, the animal’s behavior can be influenced by addressing specific brain regions and neurons.
Thus this method became very popular in behavioral neuroscience and is a great tool to get new insights in the neural basis of behavior.

Combining Optogenetics and behavioral experiments

A Biobserve Viewer video tracking system equipped with the 24
channel TTL Input/Output box lets you trigger lasers and
 any other stimuli devices in optogenetics experiments.

Optogenetics scheme

Trigger events can be defined depending on

  • time
  • the animal’s position
  • the animal’s behavior
  • other hardware signals (e.g. switches, beam breaks)
  • various combinations of conditions with if/else functions

 

In combination witht the Experiment Control Suite you can run very complex experiments where the animal itself triggers the stimuli and the chronology of the experiment.

All aspects of the experiments are recorded:

  • digital video
  • behavior analysis data
  • position data
  • trigger events

 

This hardware-software-package is highly customizable. Also for any kind of active and passive avoidance tests.