Brain Pioneers Perfecting Tiny Sensors to Capture Critical Chemical Events
Greg Gerhardt doesn’t mind being called a “brainiac.”
As a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of Kentucky, Gerhardt is the first to admit he’s fascinated by the brain and how its cells communicate.
He came to the university last year to create the Center for Sensor Technology, where researchers work to gain knowledge of the fundamental processes that occur during chemical interactions among nerve cells in the brain.
Gerhardt hopes that a better understanding of the cell-communication process will lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of such neurological disorders as Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and Alzheimer’s.
“We don’t understand the actual chemical signaling going on in the brain that allows you to move or think,” Gerhardt said. “The new technologies that we are developing here will allow us to enter the world of chemical communication between cells.
“We’re going to figure out why neurodegenerative diseases have such a big impact on people’s lives. The brain’s circuitry is being destroyed by these illnesses. By better understanding the communication process, we can better repair the damage to the brain at the cellular level.”
Don Gash, chairman of the College of Medicine’s Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, said the center is a prestigious addition to the university.
“It’s great to be at the forefront of such exciting research,” Gash said. “We are actually building instruments here in Lexington that are going to be used throughout the world. People who want to do this kind of research in London or Switzerland or wherever in the future are going to be looking to us for the technology and the expertise, and that’s exciting.”
Gerhardt established the center in 1991 at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. But after joining the College of Medicine in 1999, he arranged to transfer the Colorado center’s National Science Foundation funding to the University of Kentucky.
Research at the Center for Sensor Technology focuses on the development and use of high-tech sensors and other state-of-the-art equipment, such as tiny microelectrodes, for studies of brain function. The microelectrodes can be implanted in various regions of the brain to measure tiny amounts of chemicals such as dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, glutamate and nitric oxide.
“We design and build these very small sensors to understand how cells in the brain, called neurons, actually communicate with one another,” said Gerhardt, who also serves as director of the university’s Morris K. Udall Parkinson’s Disease Research Center. “These cells are very small, about a third of the size of a human hair. So in order to go into that environment and listen to how neurons speak, we have to develop by hand these very tiny sensors that are even smaller than the neurons themselves.
“In fact, with Harvard we are working on a procedure to actually use the sensors during neurosurgery as a tool to understand more of what’s wrong with the brain of a person that has Parkinson’s or epilepsy.”
The sensors measure lightning-quick chemical interactions that nerve cells use to exchange signals. These molecules are recorded by the tiny sensors and transmitted to a computer program where researchers can monitor the reactions.
Studies are under way using sensors implanted into the brains of laboratory rats which allow researchers to monitor what is going on in the animals’ brains while they are in motion and at rest.
A more detailed picture of the neurological signaling system could lead to better understanding of schizophrenia, depression, aging, aggression, drug abuse and even smell and taste, Gerhardt said.
“We really don’t understand a lot about smell and taste systems and how they operate,” he said. “Right now, we’re working with a marine biological laboratory on a study of lobsters and how they smell. As it turns out, a lobster is a good model system to understand many of the signaling properties that take place in the human nose to trigger smells.
“When an odor enters your nose, it binds to odor receptors. There then is a chemical interaction that takes place to signal the brain to identify that smell. It is a very rapid process, and you need very fast recording methods to be able to watch how that occurs. These sensors allow us do that.”
