Thought controls the genes 20.11.2014

Imagine that you have a cold: you sneeze, cough, measure the temperature every minute. And now you think that it would be good to increase the activity of the immune system so that it quickly expels the infection from you. And suddenly, in response to such thoughts, your immunity really activates: the synthesis of interferon increases, immune cells begin to actively hunt for the pathogen, etc.

Sounds fantastic, but that's exactly what Martin Fussenegger and his colleagues at the ETH Zurich (Switzerland) managed to do - the researchers created a device that turns brain impulses into genetic regulatory signals. Moreover, the transfer of thoughts was carried out between a person and a mouse, that is, a person thought about something, and physiological changes occurred in an animal.

However, if you disassemble the device described in Nature Communications into its component parts, it turns out that there is nothing super-fantastic in it - the authors of the work in their experiments simply combined well-known and well-developed biotechnological discoveries. Firstly, it is a brain-computer interface (BCI), and secondly, optogenetic methods. With the help of a brain-computer interface, it was possible to turn the EEG rhythms of the brain into some kind of signal directed outward, intended for an external device. An EEG sensor was attached to a person's forehead, and the person was asked to complete one of three tasks: play a computer game for ten minutes; try to turn on the LED implanted in the mouse by force of will; finally, he could just rest, daydream about anything, or meditate.

In all three cases, the brain produced rather special signals that were transmitted via Bluetooth to a device implanted in the mouse. The animal ran freely on the surface generating an electromagnetic field, and depending on the human mental state, a certain impulse went from the surface to the implant-receiver.

The implant itself was a cell with cells synthesizing a certain protein that could come out of the implant and activate the synthesis of interferon. The cells were optogenetically modified, that is, they carried a photoprotein that reacts to a light pulse of a certain wavelength. The light pulse turned on the photoreceptor, and it already gave a signal to the synthesis of a protein, including the synthesis of interferon in mice.

That is, the mental signal literally turned on the light in the implant, equipped with a special LED. Moreover, in one of the variants of the experiment, as mentioned above, a person could monitor the state of the implant himself and purposefully turn it on with a neuropsychological effort.

I must say that neurocomputer interfaces that transmit brain signals to various devices are actively used in a variety of projects (and most actively, of course, in the development of prostheses that can be controlled by the power of thought). However, to send a signal from them to the cellular-molecular apparatus in order to activate some genes and affect physiology - there have been no such precedents so far.

It is easy to imagine such a device that, for example, would relieve a person from chronic pain in response to incipient pain signals, or stop an epileptic seizure at its first signs. True, before that, many experiments still have to be done to make the technology compatible with the human body.