Significant progress has been made. Luo Minmin group to establish a new brain-brain interface to achieve "Avatar"-style cross-rat remote control.

The communication between human or animal individuals mainly depends on the sensory system, such as vision, hearing, smell and touch.the 2009 science fiction film Avatar shows that people on earth can remotely control the genetically modified Neville human body on Pandora through brain to brain direct information transmission.in recent years, studies have shown that electrophysiological information can be extracted from one animal's cerebral cortex, and then decoded to stimulate another animal's cerebral cortex through electrical stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation, thus the concept of brain brain interface is proposed.but so far, the information transmission rate of brain brain brain interface is very low, which is the most important bottleneck restricting the development of brain brain brain interface.the main technical obstacle is that the traditional brain brain brain interface needs long-term multi-channel recording of EEG, which is difficult in technology and lacks of cell specificity, and the EEG recording is difficult to decode accurately, and the decoded information is difficult to transmit to the correct neural loop or specific cell type, resulting in very low information transmission rate (0.004-0.033 bits / s).because movement includes start, end and sub second speed changes, precise control of motion with brain brain brain interface is still at the sci-fi level.recently, Luo Minmin Laboratory of Beijing Institute of life sciences / Beijing brain science and brain like research center published a research paper entitled "an optical brain to brain interface supports rapid information transmission for precise locomotion control" in Science China Life Sciences.based on their previous laboratory findings on the integrated regulation of motor, arousal and theta waves in the hippocampus, they further found that the activity of undetermined neurons in the brainstem can predict animal movement speed.based on this discovery, the authors constructed an optical brain brain interface using optical fiber recording and photogenetic activation technology, and realized the high information transmission rate of motion information transmission between two mice, thus proving the possibility of brain brain brain interface to accurately control animal movement across individuals.Figure 1 realizes the transmission of motor information between two animals based on the brain brain interface of optical recording and stimulation.A, schematic diagram of optical brain brain interface.optical fiber recording system recorded the activity of one rat's undetermined neurons (which expressed the calcium indicator protein gcamp6m, called "control mice"), and then transformed the neuronal activity signals into light pulse signals, which were then transmitted to the undetermined neurons of another mouse (expressing the light sensitive channel protein ChR2, Known as the "Avatar mouse"), the mouse head is fixed, but the body can run freely on the running wheel.b, from the top to the bottom, the motor speed of the rats was controlled, the activity of the undetermined neurons was controlled, the signal transformation equation, the light pulse signal and the movement speed of the avatar mice were controlled.C, the movement speed of avatar mice (blue) is highly synchronized with that of control mice (red).D, the movement speed of avatar rats was positively correlated with that of control rats.e, to control the information transmission rate between rats and avatars.optical brain interface enables one mouse (Master mouse, left) to precisely control the movement of another mouse (avatar mouse, right).the two mice were fixed on their heads and placed on a certain distance of running wheel.this study skillfully uses optical fiber recording and photogenetics technology, as well as neural circuits that can accurately predict and regulate animal movement speed.the researchers used a fiber-optic recording system to extract motor information from the undiagnosed neurons expressing the calcium indicator protein gcamp6m (the mouse is called a "control mouse"), and then used support vector machines and a linear formula to decode the neuronal activity signals, which were then transmitted to the undiagnosed neurons of another mouse (called "Avatar mice", FIG. 1a-b).this brain brain interface based on optical recording and stimulation realizes highly synchronized movement of animals, and the information transmission rate reaches 4.1 bits / S (Fig. 1c-e), which is 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than previous similar studies.this study highlights the importance of selecting appropriate neural circuits, recording and stimulating tools in the construction of high-performance brain brain interfaces.there are several reasons for this research to achieve high information transmission rate: firstly, the undetermined nucleus neurons in brainstem which can predict and control the movement speed are selected to extract the motor information; secondly, the optical fiber recording system is selected to record the calcium signal changes of specific cell types in the undetermined nucleus, which has the following advantages: (1) it can stably record the similar functions It can avoid the technical challenge of multi-channel recording and reduce the difficulty of neural information decoding.finally, the authors chose photogenetic stimulation to activate specific neurons in the brain of avatar rats.this study demonstrated a new brain brain brain interface based on optical recording and stimulation, which realized the operation information transmission with high information transfer rate, and fully demonstrated the potential of brain brain interface.this work was mainly completed by Lu Lihui of Luo Minmin laboratory. Wang Ruiyu assisted to complete the decoding program. Dr. Luo Minmin is the corresponding author of this article.the work was completed in Beijing Institute of life sciences and Beijing brain science and brain class research center.reference message: - end -