(Medical Xpress)—The robotic brain surgeon, featured in the 2013 movie "Enders Game" is no fictional brain-fixing machine. The open-source surgical platform, known as Raven II, has already starred in several brain procedures to date. It is not too hard now to imagine machines like this eventually installing brain controlled interfaces (BCIs). What is missing from this futuristic vision, is what happens at the business end, where the bots meet the brain. This unfolding drama, which began with crude electrode array stimulation, now parlays a combination of optical technologies that permits both transfection of neurons with interface machinery, and their subsequent control. A huge advance in automating the transfection part, and reducing the time it takes by orders of magnitude, has been reported today in Nature's Scientific Reports by a Scottish group from the University of Saint Andrews. Their new technology delivers DNA plasmids containing optical indicators and ion channels to individual neurons using arrays of femtosecond laser beams—and they can do this as fast as they can reach out and touch the neuron profiles on the screen in front of them.
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