Abstract
Over the past decade, optical tweezers (OT) have been increasingly used in neuroscience for studies of molecules and neuronal dynamics, as well as for the study of model organisms as a whole. Compared to other areas of biology, it has taken much longer for OT to become an established tool in neuroscience. This is, in part, due to the complexity of the brain and the inherent difficulties in trapping individual molecules or manipulating cells located deep within biological tissue. Recent advances in OT, as well as parallel developments in imaging and adaptive optics, have significantly extended the capabilities of OT. In this review, we describe how OT became an established tool in neuroscience and we elaborate on possible future directions for the field. Rather than covering all applications of OT to neurons or related proteins and molecules, we focus our discussions on studies that provide crucial information to neuroscience, such as neuron dynamics, growth, and communication, as these studies have revealed meaningful information and provide direction for the field into the future.
Highlights
Since the late 1980s, optical tweezers (OT) have been extensively used for studying biological cells and whole organisms (Ashkin and Dziedzic, 1987), the main reason being that OT allows the physical manipulation of biological structures and environments in a non-invasive way using only light
We focus our attention on the application of OT in neuroscience: how OT answers fundamental questions in neuroscience, the important findings that OT has delivered to the field, and where and how OT can further drive neuroscience discoveries
(section 2), we provide a description of optical tweezers with a focus on their flexibility and large number of potential applications in physics and biophysics
Summary
Since the late 1980s, optical tweezers (OT) have been extensively used for studying biological cells and whole organisms (Ashkin and Dziedzic, 1987), the main reason being that OT allows the physical manipulation of biological structures and environments in a non-invasive way using only light. As new technologies have emerged and been cleverly combined with OT, the precision and depth of OT manipulation has increased, opening new avenues for neuroscience studies This has enabled studies into the core processes driving neuronal growth and function, and on the larger scale, the formation of networks and complex information processing. Great effort has been directed toward improving the quality of optical traps, extending the size range of particles and molecules that can be optically confined, as well as toward achieving trapping and manipulation deeper within tissue and turbid media Highlighting these advances, we discuss the new potential capabilities of OT and its future in exploring neuroscience
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