Better brain implants

Felix Deku’s team in the Knight Campus is building high-quality, long-lasting brain implants that relieve symptoms of conditions like Parkinson’s, epilepsy, depression and dementia. 

These microelectrodes — thin, flexible structures a few millimeters long — are surgically placed into the brain, where they target specific neural circuits. The implant can be integrated with a tiny computer chip, also implanted into the brain. 

The devices send electrical signals that override or course-correct the faulty brain signaling that’s causing neurological problems.

Deku’s lab is addressing a major barrier to widespread adoption of this emerging technology: the relatively short lifespan of these devices.

Many legs up

An octopus devotes about 70 percent of its brain to vision. But until recently, scientists have only had a murky understanding of how these marine animals see their underwater world. 

University of Oregon neuroscientists are bringing the octopus’ view into focus.

Understanding what’s happening in other species that are very different from humans, can give us insight into what could be happening in our own brains, too, and the multitude of ways evolution can work.

If you give a worm some weed …

He might just need a snack to go with it.

Tiny worms are helping UO researchers better understand the endocannabinoid system, a far-reaching signaling network that helps regulate key body systems like appetite, mood and pain sensation. 

Molecules called endocannabinoids send chemical messages by interacting with cannabinoid receptors, special proteins that are sprinkled throughout the body and brain.

Shawn Lockery’s lab has shown that worms exposed to a cannabinoid become even more interested in the kind of food that they’d already prefer. The effect is similar to craving potato chips and ice cream after a few puffs of marijuana, a phenomenon known scientifically as “hedonic feeding” but colloquially called “the munchies.”

A fishy tale

A question left unanswered in a biologist’s lab notebook for 40 years has finally been explained, thanks to a little zebrafish that couldn’t wriggle its tail. 

Research in Judith Eisen’s lab shows how nerve cells and muscle cells communicate through electrical signals during development, a phenomenon known as bioelectricity.

The communication, which takes place via specialized channels between cells, is vital for proper development and behavior. The finding offers clues to the genetic origins of muscle disorders in humans and taps into long-standing questions in developmental biology. 

A major interest in neuroscience

The UO’s undergraduate neuroscience program is the first of its kind at a public university in Oregon and has proven a popular choice for students, who have swelled its ranks since the major was first offered in 2020.

It’s a program that goes back a long way in UO history, from the early development of zebrafish as a model lab organism in the 1960s, to the founding of the Institute for Neuroscience in 1979, to recent breakthroughs in materials and microfabrication of neural interfaces at the Knight Campus. That history has made the major a gateway for undergraduates who want to get involved in groundbreaking research.

Read about some of the students who got in on the ground floor and found themselves contributing to top-level research in labs investigating neural implants, proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease, nervous system development, complex thinking and more.

Going deep

With roughly 100 billion neurons in the human brain, there’s a lot of background chatter. Luca Mazzucato, a computational neuroscientist at the UO, is decoding those signals to predict the relationships between different neurons.

That could eventually improve deep brain stimulation, an emerging treatment that involves stimulating specific areas of the brain to relieve the symptoms of disorders like Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and depression. Mazzucato’s work could help doctors figure out exactly which neurons to stimulate without extensive trial and error, making the technique less risky and more cost-effective.