Team:NYMU-Taipei/synthetic-neurobiology

1. Cell-Type-Specific Optical Neuromodulation Interfaces: They developed optogenetic molecular methods for making neurons able to be activated or silenced by multiple colors of light, hoping to stimulate and inactivate neurons precisely from one to many at a time, and with more complex spatiotemporal patterns.
2. Gene Therapy Devices: They are developing fluidic systems to facilitate viral delivery in complex tissues since gene therapy is increasing its importance in years to come.
3. Molecular Sensitizers for Optical Manipulation of Biological Systems: They have engineered molecular sensitizers making genetically specified neurons can be activated and silenced by differently-colored pulses of light.
4. Non-Invasive, Focal, and Portable Brain Stimulators: They are applying modern engineering techniques to create a portable, focal, non-invasive brain stimulator that enable a new platform for therapeutic neuromodulation.
5. Principles of Controlling Neural Circuits: By using cell-type-specific optical neural control technologies , they are seeking to discover new principles for treating neural disease.
6. Real-Time Data Mining and Perturbation: They propose to design and develop a system that continuously generates novel data-modeling hypotheses and evaluates them in real time, testing models of ever-increasing complexity on data as it comes in.

Fig. 2: Professor Edward Boyden, the Benesse Career Development Professor, and Associate Professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute.

The similarity between our project and research in synthetic neurobiology group includes our devotion to developing one non-invasive, focal, and portable brain stimulators, which can apply to future therapeutic neuromodulation. We both use some standardized sets of bioengineering parts, and some design rules for creating the novel neurobiological systems, which make sense and work in a predictable way.

Though we have the same final goal, there are some differences in the design circuits. The main part of the research in synthetic neurobiology group uses optogenetic molecular methods for making neurons able to be activated or silenced by multiple colors of light. In this part, the biochemical circuits mainly dominate the whole process. However, in the other hand, we use the mechanic force to induce the light by changing the conformation of the transmembrane protein.The induced fluorescence phenomenon is directly using physical approach instead of using the traditional biochemical circuits. (See Optomagnetic design) The circuit concepts we come up with combine both physic and biochemical views; we use physical force to drive the circuit hoping to light up the neurons immediately while biochemical reaction usually take much more time.