Dr. Brian Chow

The PhysOrg article Neuroengineers silence brain cells with multiple colors of light said

Neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently developed a way to turn off abnormally active brain cells using multiple colors of light. This research could prove useful for managing disorders including chronic pain, epilepsy, brain injury, and Parkinson’s disease.
 
When neurons are engineered to express Arch and Mac, researchers can inhibit their activity by shining light on them. Light activates the proteins, which lowers the voltage in the neurons and safely and effectively prevents them from firing. In this way, light can bathe the entire brain and selectively affect only those neurons sensitized to specific colors of light. Neurons engineered to express Arch are specifically silenced by yellow light, while those expressing Mac are silenced by blue light.
 
“In this way the brain can be programmed with different colors of light to identify and possibly correct the corrupted neural computations that lead to disease,” explains coauthor Brian Chow.

Brian Chow, Ph.D. is Postdoctoral Fellow, Synthetic Neurobiology Group, MIT.
 
Brian is currently developing new molecular and physical tools to control excitable cells, currently focusing on genetically targetable, light-activated neural activity silencers. He earned his Ph.D. from MIT, inventing a platform for optically synthesizing DNA microarrays by leveraging semiconductor photoelectrochemistry. His thesis was Photoelectromechanical synthesis of low-cost DNA microarrays. Prior to MIT, Brian earned his B.S. in Chemistry from Stanford University and worked as an engineer at IBM Storage Systems Division.
 
He is working on molecular reagents that mediate optical neural activation where he has been adapting genetically-encoded reagents from nature and engineering them in order to sensitize cellular processes to being controlled by light. One of his areas of innovation is in creating molecular tools that, when genetically targeted to specific neurons, allow them to be activated by brief pulses of light. In this way, the sufficiency of a neural pathway, cell type, or brain region in generating a given behavior, neural computation, or pathology can be assessed. Furthermore, these ultraprecise tools may empower a new generation of optical control prosthetics. The reagent channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2), for example, depolarizes cells in which it is expressed, in response to pulses of blue light.
 
He is also working on molecular reagents that mediate optical neural silencing where he has been adapting genetically-encoded reagents from nature and engineering them in order to sensitize cellular processes to being controlled by light. One of his areas of innovation is in creating molecular tools that, when genetically targeted to specific neurons, allow them to be silenced by brief pulses of light. In this way, the necessity of a neural pathway, cell type, or brain region in generating a given behavior, neural computation, or pathology can be assessed, in a time-resolved fashion.
 
Furthermore, these ultraprecise tools may empower a new generation of optical control prosthetics. The reagent halorhodopsin from N. pharaonis (Halo/NpHR), for example, hyperpolarizes cells in which it is expressed, in response to pulses of yellow/orange light. The reagent Arch (archaerhodopsin-3 from H. sodomense) enables currents ~an order of magnitude bigger than those of Halo. The reagent Mac (the opsin from L. maculans) enables silencing in response to blue light, which alongside the other reagents enables multi-color silencing.
 
Brian coauthored High-performance halorhodopsin variants for improved genetically-targetable optical neural silencing.
 
Read his LinkedIn profile.