ABOVE: A TASTE OF TEMPERATURE: Adult Drosophila ventral nerve cord motor neurons expressing the gustatory thermoreceptor Gr28bD (left); in gray is a 3D reconstruction of the motor neurons, in green is neural activity in response to heat, with the green trace showing calcium currents in a single neuron (right).
MISHRA ET AL., SCI REP, 8:901, 2018
Tools that use light, drugs, or temperature to make neurons fire or rest on command have become a mainstay in neuroscience. Thermogenetics, which enables neurons to respond to temperature shifts, first took off with fruit flies about a decade ago, but is emerging as a new trick to manipulate the neural functioning of other model organisms. That’s due to some advantages it affords over optogenetics—the light-based technique that started it all.
Genetic toolkits such as thermogenetics and optogenetics follow a basic recipe: scientists pick a receptor that responds to an external cue such as temperature ...
