Novel MRI Sensor Provides Molecular View of the Brain

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Newswise — MIT neuroscientists have designed a new MRI sensor that responds to the neurotransmitter dopamine, an achievement that may significantly improve the specificity and resolution of future brain imaging procedures.,,
This means that we can see signal changes in the brain due to the modulation of dopamine,” explained Gil Westmeyer, joint first author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in Jasanoff’s lab who directed the in vivo work. “This novel MRI sensor will enable us to study the spatial and temporal patterns of dopamine transmission over the vast and heterogeneous dopamine network in the brain.”

Next Steps: Jasanoff’s team will use the new MRI sensor to study how the spatial and temporal patterns of dopamine release relate to an animal’s experience of reward, learning, and reinforcement. They hope to develop a related suite of new tools to detect different molecular events across the whole brain, and they expect to see additional gains in sensitivity through improved experimental paradigms and further molecular engineering.

While synthetic molecules are typically introduced into the brain with external devices, Jasanoff’s new sensor is based on a protein, which means that researchers may also have the ability to genetically encode the sensor to express on its own. The new dopamine sensor is an important tool for animal research, but the researchers also hope one day to develop agents that can measure neural activity in the human brain.