Abstract:
I will briefly cover two stories: (1) The restoration of light response with complex spatiotemporal features in retinal degenerative diseases towards retinal prosthesis has proven to be a considerable challenge over the past decades. Herein, inspired by the structure and function of photoreceptors in retinas, we developed artificial photoreceptors based on gold nanoparticle-decorated titania (Au-TiO2) nanowire arrays, for restoration of visual responses in the blind mice with degenerated photoreceptors. Green, blue and near UV light (visible to mouse, insects and birds) responses in the retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) were restored with a spatial resolution approaching or better than 100 µm. Neurons in the primary visual cortex responded to light after subretinal implant of nanowire arrays into blind mice. Improvement in pupillary light reflex suggested the behavioral recovery of light sensitivity. Our study will shed light on the development of a new generation of optoelectronic toolkits for subretinal implants and prosthetic devices. (2) Most animals on earth can detect the color of their surroundings through their visual system. However, a few animals on earth such as chameleon can utilize the color information of the surrounding to change their skin colors for camouflage. Here, we developed a novel brain-interfaced camouflage system using color-coding signals in the primary visual cortex of mice to drive highly flexible electroluminescence textiles. The textile was made from continuous electroluminescent fibres made by a one-step extruding process. The resulting displaying textile is flexible, stretchable, three-dimensionally twistable, conformable to arbitrarily curved skins and breathable, and can dynamically display a series of desired patterns.
Biography:
Dr. Jiayi Zhang received her B. Sc. Degree in physics from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2003 and Ph.D. degree from Brown University in 2009. From 2009 to 2011, she was a Brown-Coxe postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Neurobiology in Yale University. She joined Institutes of Brain Science at Fudan University in 2012.
Her recent work focused on the function, restoration and device-interface of vision. Her research is supported by 1000-plan young scholar and Excellent-Young-Investigator grant from NSFC.
Sponsored by the NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at NYU Shanghai