Scientists use Open Ephys GUI to study how psychedelics affect the brain

Software co-created by the Allen Institute is helping scientists better understand psilocybin, which could lead to new treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders like depression

By Peter Kim

Alex Kwan, Ph.D., is a researcher at Cornell University passionate about finding new therapies for neuropsychiatric disorders like depression. In addition to his role at the school’s biomedical engineering department, he has been a faculty member in the psychiatry departments at both Yale and Cornell, where he learned about the debilitating toll of mental illness and the hopelessness many feel given the limited treatment options available to them.

“For 20 years, people have depended mostly on treatments like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) or electroconvulsive therapy, things that we have used for so long; but we know that they take a while to begin working, and some people don’t respond to them very well,” said Kwan. “So it’s very exciting to have a new treatment option on the horizon.”

(Photo credit: Ryan Young, Cornell University)

Alex Kwan works on microscopy equipment in his lab in Weill Hall.
(Photo credit: Ryan Young/Cornell University)

Using psilocybin to treat brain disorders

Kwan’s research team, which included Cory Knox, Quan Jiang, and Pasha Davoudian, made some of these discoveries using Neuropixels probes to record from hundreds of mouse brain cells in real time, and an advanced open-source software package called Open Ephys GUI.

Benefits of Open Ephys GUI

Another benefit of Open Ephys GUI is that it’s hardware agnostic: it can work with multiple pieces of equipment and hardware, making it much more flexible than other systems. In the past, scientists were locked into one company and had to spend thousands of dollars buying their hardware and software to perform experiments and record and process data because there wasn’t compatibility between companies.

Open Ephys GUI is free for anyone to download and works on any operating system. It has been used to collect data for hundreds of scientific publications and has made extracellular electrophysiology more accessible in countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa.

“One of the very critical criteria for us is stability of the software. Open Ephys has been rock solid. Particularly for us, we had to record for a long time and it’s very important for the recording to be stable before and after the drug is administered. It’s a two-hour continuous recording; the system cannot crash,” said Kwan.

“Scientific progress depends on a handful of indispensable open-source software tools. Open Ephys GUI is one of them—an essential driver of the revolution in multichannel neurophysiology. Its features empower a wide range of experiments, but above all, it is exceptionally robust and reliable.” 

Karel Svoboda, Ph.D., executive vice president and director of the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics

Advancing our understanding of the brain

Kwan and his research team are shedding valuable light onto the potential therapeutic effects of psilocybin, laying the groundwork for new drugs that could help treat depression and other serious brain disorders. Their findings—including how pyramidal tract neurons respond to the psychedelic compound—were published in the journal Nature. His team now hopes to broaden our understanding of the brain by analyzing behavioral data; and with Open Ephys GUI’s versatility, that area of investigation is ripe for discovery.

Authors

Peter Kim
Published September 16, 2025
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