Tiny Lights in the Brain's Black Box
By Madeline Klinger, Markita Landry
Carbon nanotubes can image dopamine and other neuromodulators implicated in Parkinson’s, depression, and other currently incurable diseases.
This Article From Issue
January-February 2022
Volume 110, Number 1
Page 36
Over the past two centuries, human understanding of the brain and its inner workings has grown dramatically. We have advanced from figuring out how to visualize isolated neurons to developing drugs to treat a variety of psychiatric and neurological diseases.
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- Although scientists have a general picture of how signals move through the brain, they haven’t been able to zoom in and observe the brain’s chemistry in real time.
- For decades, doctors have treated diseases such as depression and Parkinson’s disease with drugs, without knowing exactly how those drugs act on molecules and cells.
- New fluorescent probes made from carbon nanotubes could offer a noninvasive way to observe chemical signals in the brain, yielding insights and therapies.
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