Light and chemical control of neuronal circuits: possible applications in neurotherapy

The history of long-term potentiation as a memory mechanism: Controversies, confirmation, and some lessons to remember

The discovery of long-term potentiation (LTP) provided the first, direct evidence for long-lasting synaptic plasticity in the living brain. Consequently, LTP was proposed to serve as a mechanism for information storage among neurons, thus providing the basis for the behavioral and psychological phenomena of learning and long-term memory formation. However, for several decades, the LTP-memory hypothesis remained highly controversial, with inconsistent and contradictory evidence providing a barrier to its general acceptance. This review summarizes the history of these early debates, challenges, and experimental strategies (successful and unsuccessful) to establish a link between LTP and memory. Together, the empirical evidence, gathered over a period of about four decades, strongly suggests that LTP serves as one of the mechanisms affording learning and memory storage in neuronal circuits. Notably, this body of work also offers some important lessons that apply to the broader fields of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience. As such, the history of LTP as a learning mechanism provides valuable insights to neuroscientists exploring the relations between brain and psychological states.

Psychopharmacology: From serendipitous discoveries to rationale design, but what next?

Psychopharmacology really developed as a discipline from the mid-20th century with the discovery of a number of new classes of psychoactive drugs which could modify behaviour. These drugs were discovered as a consequence of clinical observations of patients, often being treated for other conditions. These serendipitous discoveries were the start of an era of drug development which has led to the antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics and mood stabilisers used today. Subsequent research focused on understanding why these drugs were effective, and used this information to develop a second generation of drugs that were more selective for their therapeutic targets, and therefore had reduced side effects and improved safety and tolerability. After a period of decline in new discoveries and withdrawal of the majority of the major pharmaceutical companies from active development programmes in psychiatry, new avenues are emerging fuelling renewed interest in this area.

Optogenetic modulation in stroke recovery

Stroke is one of the leading contributors to morbidity, mortality, and health care costs in the United States. Although several preclinical strategies have shown promise in the laboratory, few have succeeded in the clinical setting. Optogenetics represents a promising molecular tool, which enables highly specific circuit-level neuromodulation. Here, the conceptual background and preclinical body of evidence for optogenetics are reviewed, and translational considerations in stroke recovery are discussed.

Synthetic biology for pharmaceutical drug discovery

Synthetic biology (SB) is an emerging discipline, which is slowly reorienting the field of drug discovery. For thousands of years, living organisms such as plants were the major source of human medicines. The difficulty in resynthesizing natural products, however, often turned pharmaceutical industries away from this rich source for human medicine. More recently, progress on transformation through genetic manipulation of biosynthetic units in microorganisms has opened the possibility of in-depth exploration of the large chemical space of natural products derivatives. Success of SB in drug synthesis culminated with the bioproduction of artemisinin by microorganisms, a tour de force in protein and metabolic engineering. Today, synthetic cells are not only used as biofactories but also used as cell-based screening platforms for both target-based and phenotypic-based approaches. Engineered genetic circuits in synthetic cells are also used to decipher disease mechanisms or drug mechanism of actions and to study cell-cell communication within bacteria consortia. This review presents latest developments of SB in the field of drug discovery, including some challenging issues such as drug resistance and drug toxicity.