SCItations

As I’m reading through the abstracts for Biophysics 2018, I can’t help but get excited about all the cutting-edge research there is to discover at this meeting! Although my schedule is double and triple booked with talks and posters, I’ve bookmarked one of each type of presentation as absolute must-sees. Check it out! Sub-group Saturday talk: Progress in developing (single) inorganic voltage nanosensors Shimon Weiss (Bar Ilan University; UCLA) Nanoscale Biophysics Subgroup; Esplanade, Room 160 Saturday, 1:35 PM Why I’m excited: This is an approach to voltage-imaging that I’m not familiar with. Although great improvements have been made to genetically encoded voltage sensors, non-invasive voltage imaging is another story. I anticipate some impressive movies at this talk of membrane-embedded nanosensors detecting single action potentials! Platform talk: Dissecting function and distribution of sodium channels and gap junctional proteins using super-resolution patch-cla...

Just a quick announcement: The next couple posts are going to be cross-published on the Biophysical Society blog as part of their national meeting. I get to write about exciting, often unpublished biophysics research while I attend the conference. Exciting! You can visit the BPS blog here , or just continue reading on this site. Enjoy!

Last week I learned something wild about our brains and bodies that has to do with the way we taste food. It turns out our body knows when we are eating something nutritive or when we are just eating junk. Okay, I know you’re freaking out right now because somehow your brain is keeping track of when you eat a kale salad vs. a fried chicken thigh – like Santa making his naughty vs nice list – but that’s not quite what I mean. What I mean is that your brain knows when the food you’re eating contains calories or not. The crazy thing is that when your fed and happy, your brain doesn’t care whether you eat energy-rich foods or not and your preferences are dominated by flavor. However, if you find yourself stranded on a desert island going on a week without food, your brain is going to know whether you climbed that tree for the juicy, sweet coconut or whether you slammed that last Sweet-N-Low packet you’ve been saving in your pocket since your plane crashed. This is research I heard ab...

I would guess most of you don’t spend much time with your eyes closed for the sole purpose of looking at the backs of your eyelids. I don't either. In fact, the only reason this topic is on my mind at all is because recently I have been treating some intermittent eye-itchiness by applying warm compresses to my closed lids. This requires me to spend several minutes with my eyes shut with nothing to do but watch the backs of my eyelids. How pleasantly surprised I was to find that there is ample entertainment back there to keep me from either going crazy or falling asleep. What I discovered while reclining with a hot towel on my face were phosphenes: brilliant patterns of light, pulsing and evolving with intricate motion and color, intensified by the application of  pressure on my covered lids. You've probably seen phosphenes before, perhaps while rubbing your weary eyes or while dosing off in a pitch dark room, but have you ever purposely tried to evoke ...

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The field of optogenetics has taken that motto to heart and paid photosynthetic algae an immense complement. It’s actually very common for science and engineering technology to take a hint from nature, but in this case that hint was actually entire gene sequences. Channelrhodopsins are a group of proteins found in some photosynthetic algae which directly regulate the flow of ions through membranes. I’ve talked about channel proteins before and how their activity can be modulated by either chemical or electrical signals, but these channelrhodopsins are special because they are activated by light. The discovery of the genes that code for these proteins and the genetic engineering that has introduced these genes into mammalian cells has spurred research in the area called optogenetics . Perhaps most famously, optogenetics has been applied to neuroscience with the transfection of neurons with the channelrhodopsin gene. A ...