Indian American’s breaking research with Brain waves.

Sreekanth Chalasani,an Indian American researcher from Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California has developed a new way to selectively activate brain, heart, muscle and other cells using ultrasonic sound waves.

Dubbed as sonogenetics, the new technique has some similarities to the burgeoning use of light to activate cells in order to better understand the brain.

“Light-based techniques are great for some uses. But this is a new, additional tool to manipulate neurons and other cells in the body,” informed , … The real prize will be to see whether this could work in a mammalian brain,”- said Chalasani.

The new method which uses the same type of waves used in medical sonograms may have advantages over the light-based approach, known as optogenetics.

Researchers add light-sensitive channel proteins to neurons they wish to study which is called optogenetics, by shining a focused laser on the cells, they can selectively open these channels, either activating or silencing the target neurons.

Chalasani and his group decided to see if they could develop an approach that instead relied on ultrasound waves for the activation.  His group has already begun testing the approach in mice.

“When we make the leap into therapies for humans, I think we have a better shot with noninvasive sonogenetics approaches than with optogenetics,” he emphasised in a paper appeared in the journal Nature Communications.