Opsin

Early on, evolution found a good method for turning light into a rapid signal within a cell, a method that did not lead easily into an attractor of much better methods, and it has kept that method, FN.

Although, evolution didn't get opsins from nowhere.

Opsins evolved from previous sensor proteins that cells used to detect chemicals, and the thing where a previous payload, G-protein-coupled receptors, made it easier for this new payload, vision, to arise, does remind me of the payload lens.

See, name of later section in this essay about payloads giving each other toeholds.

The PAX6 gene, a master control gene that activates many other genes that together build eyes, is also highly conserved.

Sure.

These proteins were produced by a bunch of different genes that we're just going to call Opsin genes.

There's Rhodopsin and channelrhodopsin.

We don't need to get into that unless you take my Intro to Neuroscience course, but we're calling them Opsin genes.

And More importantly, getting even more precise, we realized that one of these proteins acts as a specific component for a membrane pump.

So imagine you're on the surface of a cell membrane and there's basically a well, a hole that goes through the membrane that lets ions in and out.

So that is much harder and that's a work in progress.

There are ways of trying to make Opsin to be expressed only in cells that cells that were active when the mouse is doing a certain task.

So we also talked a little bit about this previously.

So if you use FOSS as a promoter to drive these Opsins, then if you make the mouse do a task and the cell is firing and the FOSS is being made in those cells, now those cells can make the option and then as soon as as long as you have a time window that you can control so it only makes those options during that task you can now try to relight those cells but still when you shine a light those cells are still firing synchronously so you still can't really you're playing a chord as opposed to an actual you know individual keys so that's some of the limitations but anyway going back to the paper the because we're hitting our time limit here.

The Dyseroth lab basically identified the posterior insula as a potential culprit because it lit up more.

It also fired more.

I think

people now will understand why this is Nobel Prize winning work.

This is a natural way how bacteria kind of keeps a record of its infections.

So these scientists were studying this algae and they wanted to see, well, how does the algae move around and how does it control that process? And so through those studies, then they were able to find these special proteins called opsins, O-P-S-I-N.

And these are proteins that are light sensitive.

So whenever light shines on them, they will respond quickly.