Optogenetics: Illuminating the Path toward Causal Neuroscience

Edward Boyden is the Y. Eva Tan Professor of Neurotechnology, Professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT’s Media Lab and McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and Co-Director of the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering. In 2018, he was selected to be an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  While a PhD student at Stanford, he discovered that the molecular mechanisms used to store a memory are determined by the content to be learned. In parallel, he co-invented optogenetic control of neurons. In particular, he and co-winner Karl Deisseroth brainstormed about how microbial opsins could be used to mediate optical control of neural activity while both were students. Together, the two of them collaborated to demonstrate the firstoptical control of neural activity using microbial opsins, with Karl, then a postdoc, and Ed, then a graduate student, performing the gene transfection and the optical stimulation respectively.

His lab at MIT pioneered optogenetic neural silencing using microbial opsins, and further developed the optogenetic toolset towards the neuroscience-driven goals of powerful, noninvasive, high-speed, multiplexed, and single-cell targeted optical control of neural activity. Dr. Boyden has received the Grete Lundbeck Brain Prize (2013), the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award (2013), the Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences (2015), the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2015), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2016), and the Canada Gairdner International Award (2018).  He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors.

Deisseroth received his AB from Harvard, MD from Stanford, and PhD from Stanford in 1998. He launched his laboratory spanning the Departments of Bioengineering and Psychiatry at Stanford in July 2004, where he and his students created and developed both optogenetics with microbial opsin genes (a technology to control specific neurons with light), and hydrogel-tissue chemistry (which includes CLARITY, STARmap, and many variants—all allowing the transformation of tissues into optically transparent and tractable hydrogel-hybrid forms suitable for high-resolution structural and molecular study). He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2010, National Academy of Sciences in 2012, and National Academy of Engineering in 2019.Twenty-three alumni from his lab have moved on to tenure-track faculty positions (including Feng Zhang and Ed Boyden, the two students on his initial optogenetics paper).

Deisseroth was the sole recipient (for optogenetics) of the 2010 Koetser Prize, 2010 Nakasone Prize, 2013 Lounsbery Prize, 2014 Dickson Prize in Science, 2015 Keio Prize, 2015 Lurie Prize, 2015 Albany Prize, 2015 Dickson Prize in Medicine, 2017 Redelsheimer Prize, 2017 Fresenius Prize, 2018 Eisenberg Prize, and 2018 Kyoto Prize. For his discoveries, Deisseroth has also received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award (2005), Zuelch Prize (2012), Perl Prize (2012), BRAIN Prize (2013), Pasarow Prize (2013), Breakthrough Prize (2015), Gabbay Prize (2015), BBVA Award (2016), Massry Prize (2016) and Harvey Prize from the Technion in Israel (2017).

Peter Hegemann is a Hertie professor for neuroscience and head of Experimental Biophysics at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin. Hegemanns research focused almost entirely on the characterization of natural sensory photoreceptors. Hegemann has characterized behavioral and photoelectric responses of the unicellular alga Chlamydomonas, a work that cumulated in the claim that the photoreceptors for these responses a rhodopsins that unify the sensor and ion channel in one protein. He has finally proven this concept by identifying the light gated channel channelrhodopsin, and its functionality in animal cells.

His group characterized this protein in molecular detail by a wide range of biophysical techniques; in close collaboration with Karl Deisseroth this lead to the deciphering of the ion channel mechanism, including gating and ion selection. This work was the basis for the discovery of Optogenetics, a technology where light activated proteins – first of all channelrhodopsin - allow to control selected cells of large networks as the animal brain with unprecedented precision in space and time just by application of light. The Hegemann group also works on light-activated enzymes which further expand the optogenetic applications to important biochemical pathways.

Gero Miesenböck is Waynflete Professor of Physiology and founding Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at the University of Oxford. Before coming to Oxford in 2007, he held faculty appointments at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Yale University. Miesenböck was the first scientist to modify neurons genetically so that their electrical activity could be controlled with light. This involved inserting DNA for light-responsive opsin proteins into the cells. He used similar genetic modifications to breed animals whose brains contained light-responsive neurons integrated into their circuitry and was the first to demonstrate that the behavior of these animals could be remote-controlled. Miesenböck has received many awards for the invention of optogenetics, including the InBev-Baillet Latour International Health Prize, the Brain Prize, the Heinrich Wieland Prize, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, and the Massry Prize. He is a member of the Austrian and German Academies of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society.