*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
“Optogenetic Tools for Engineering Biological Circuits”
Brian Chow, Ph.D.
Bioengineering
University of Pennsylvania
Optogenetics permits myriad events in cell signaling, excitability, and gene transcription to be optically perturbed and sensed, thereby providing a set of input/output interfaces to biological circuits with the biochemical precision of pharmacological agents and the spatiotemporal resolution of optoelectronic devices. The rapidly expanding toolbox is ultimately comprised of proteins that induce or report physiological changes in response to light. This talk will focus on the creation of novel optogenetic tools with enhanced biochemical functions and spectral range, which have been gained through genomic discovery of novel photoreceptors, structure-guided protein engineering, and/or artificial protein design from first principles. Applications of these tools in decoding the computational principles of biological circuits in context of therapeutic interventions will also be discussed.
