A Glowing Protein Helps Scientists Visualize Brain Cell Activity

Neurons are brain cells that can represent and store information, and they help our bodies to respond to events happening around us. How is information represented, processed and stored by neurons? Which neurons are activated while we perform a specific behavior? These are fundamental scientific questions. One important experimental approach to answering these questions is to record the activity of neurons inside the brain. In 2001, scientists developed an approach that uses light and a fascinating protein that becomes brightly fluorescent when neurons are active. This engineered protein, called GCaMP, responds to the amount of calcium inside the neurons considering that once a neuron is active, calcium inside it increases. GCaMP is now commonly used in laboratories all over the world to study neurons activity. In this article, we explain how this tool works and what makes it so useful for studying the brain.