A conference attendee tries the Backyard Brains optogenetics kit. Photo: Mo Costandi

The first of my two news features about the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting is now online. It's about a mini-symposium called Low Cost Neuroscience for the Amateur, High School Student, Undergraduate, and Public, held on Saturday, November 12th.

The symposium was chaired by Tim Marzullo, the co-founder of Backyard Brains, a young company that makes and distributes affordable neuroscience kits for students of all ages. Their latest product, which they demonstrated at the conference, enables students to use optogenetics, a state-of-the-art technique in which neural activity and animal behaviour can be manipulated with laser light.

My article, Do-It-Yourself Neuroscience, is online at the Dana Foundation website. I interviewed Tim for the piece and the transcript is below. Ewen Callaway also covered the optogenetics kit for Nature.



Why did you and Greg set up Backyard Brains?

I had to go to grad school and get a Ph.D. to study neuroscience. I'm crazy enough to want to be a professional neuroscientist, but for every researcher there are thousands of others who are naturally curious about the brain. If astronomy were like neuroscience, you'd need a Ph.D. to look through a telescope. It's completely ridiculous. The technology for recording action potentials is 90 years old and there's no technological barrier for why you can't bring it into schools. We just had to go about building a little amplifier and actually distributing it. I come from a family of teachers and I'm a bit of a gearhead, so Backyard Brains came out of combining my love of neuroscience, education and building things.



Can you tell me about your optogenetics kit?

We took optogenetics technology and reduced the cost so that high school students can learn about and use it. We set ourselves the challenge over the past year of developing a portable optogenetics and electrophysiology rig. This is a little bit more complicated than our previous gear, the SpikerBox amplifier which allows us to measure action potentials in the cockroach or cricket leg.

Optogenetics needs transgenic organisms so we're limited to our models. We have a collaborator [Stefan Pulver] from the University of Cambridge and Cornell who's made these transgenic fruit flies with Channelrhodopsin expressed in all cholinergic neurons. Using 3D printing technology we designed, printed and assembled a manipulator to position our electrodes. Then we took an off-the-shelf microscope and [Backyard Brains co-founder] Greg invented the final component we needed – the LED control circuitry.

Using an iPad we can precisely deliver blue light pulses at any interval we want to stimulate the preparation. In fruit fly larvae, ChR2 is expressed in cholinergic neurons that make the muscles contract when you stimulate them. Look through the microscope and you'll see the larvae crawling along on the substrate; you shine a blue light on them and they contract.

How does Backyard Brains fit in to the wider DIY bio scene?

Most DIY bio folks do molecular stuff. They come from computer science backgrounds, mostly, and are intrigued by the DNA code and want to start investigating it themselves. But loading and running a gel doesn't really lend itself to educational demos. Our advantage is that the electrical activity of neurons provides teaching in real time, because you can actually see it before your very eyes.

We see ourselves as part of a broader movement of DIY hackers who are trying to build just-good-enough versions of gear to reduce the barrier to entry. A lot of us are inspired by the computer science revolution – when the PC became affordable enough for the consumer, massive changes occurred in society, and are still occurring today. The life sciences don't really have that innovation – the reason is you need a lot of training so you have to go to grad school and the gear is so expensive. We're trying to solve both of those problems by developing low cost gear and educational materials. Plus building things is a lot of fun. It seems like a perfect way to get underprivileged kids interested in neuroscience.

Exactly – we're actually from southeastern Michigan, so we've gone to Detroit and surrounding areas many times to do workshops and demos. Our first high school demonstration of optogenetics in fruit flies was in an urban school in Detroit. Those were the first high school students in the world to see this technology, so we're pretty proud of that.