Ed Boyden
@eboyden3
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Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, MIT. Investigator, HHMI. Leader, Synthetic Neurobiology Group. Inventor. Entrepreneur.
MIT and HHMI, Cambridge, MA
Joined November 2008
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Wow, very honored and grateful! Just got the call a few minutes ago... Quite overwhelming. A testament to the work of so many people -- grad students, postdocs, collaborators, friends -- working together over so many years. And quite a bit of serendipity and luck, too.
Congratulations Edward S. Boyden
@eboyden3
of
@MIT
@MITdeptofBE
@HHMINEWS
, newly elected
#NASmember
!
#NAS156
#neurotechnology
#BiologicalEngineering
#neurobiology
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A fly-through through the fly brain... A new rendering by Y. Bando (Toshiba Memory Corp/MIT), K. Hiwada (Toshiba Memory Corp), R. Gao (MIT/Janelia), S. Upadhyayula (HMS/Janelia), S. Asano (MIT), Y. Aso (Janelia), E. Betzig (UC Berkeley/Janelia), E. Boyden (MIT).
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One of my favorite movies from our paper on cortical column and whole-brain imaging with nanoscale resolution () - Movie 3, "Synaptic proteins and their associations to neuronal processes in layers IV and V of the mouse primary somatosensory cortex."
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Justin Trudeau asking tough questions about how expansion microscopy works. (Photo credit: Holly Birns)
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MIT has approved a new major, "Computation and Cognition," which explores topics such as human and machine intelligence, and neural systems:
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Very honored and excited to have been named an HHMI Investigator. Looking forward to heading into some completely new areas of science. And congratulations to the other new investigators as well!
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MIT News: announcing Archon, a new fluorescent voltage indicator for imaging neural activity. We found it by inventing a robotic method for doing directed evolution in mammalian cells. Paper to appear today in Nature Chemical Biology.
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We are working on a cookbook-style protocol for learning expansion microscopy, designed for beginners with only basic biology experience -- would anyone want to try and beta-test it, and give us feedback? Email us at info
@expansionmicroscopy
.org !
#expansionmicroscopy
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Just published in
@natBME
: expansion revealing (ExR), a 20x
#expansionmicroscopy
method that evenly separates proteins from each other for better antibody labeling, and nanoprecise imaging, on ordinary microscopes. Link to PDF:
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In Science, today: What if we run expansion microscopy backwards? Announcing implosion fabrication -- a new way of making nanotechnology, inexpensively and quickly! The news article, from MIT News. 1/4
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In Science today: in a collaboration between Eric Betzig's group and our group, we used lattice light sheet microscopy to image expansion microscopy specimens, resulting in a ~1000x speedup in nanoresolution imaging. Paper: 1/5
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Just published: the light-activated protein melanopsin provides a tool for optogenetically controlling glial cells, which make up perhaps half of the cells of the brain. Such tools could help probe how glia contribute to processes like memory formation.
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@ProfSharona
@McLNeuro
I was on the Media Lab Disobedience Award jury that picked BethAnn as a winner for her work fighting sexual harassment in STEM. To continue to show solidarity and support, I have notified my hosts that I will delay my visit until this very concerning situation has been addressed.
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The Principles of Neuroengineering lecture where I try to explain everything we know- and don’t know- about neurons in 90 minutes.
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Very honored and grateful to receive, along with my fantastic colleagues, the 2019 Warren Alpert Prize for developing optogenetic tools.
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Should we start some kind of neuroscience jobs network, to help inventors, executives, clinicians, scientists, regulatory experts, and other professionals connect to start new companies, launch new collaborations, and brainstorm new ideas?
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When I first started reading biology/medical publications, I labeled each sentence or concept with the type of knowledge it was. 2/3
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Seeing pictures of the GABA receptor, otoferlin, and calmodulin -- taken on an ordinary light microscope using ONE (one nanometer expansion microscopy) -- was thrilling.
The revolution will not be vitrified! Move over
#cryoEM
&
#cryoET
, welcome
#ONE_Microscopy
😍 Amazing work from
@AliHShaib
and the Rizzoli lab, building on concepts from
@eboyden3
and
@HenriquesLab
. With a
#GABAA
receptor teaser from
@danielmihaylov7
😉
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Some more holiday reading: the story of Walter Pitts, the homeless teenager who went on to kick off the field of neural networks (the foundations of many ideas in modern AI), and then burned his PhD thesis, and vanished from view.
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Some medical studies are more fun to volunteer for than others. (Seen in the halls of a Harvard building today.)
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We have a moral imperative to fill this gap by inventing radical new treatments for brain diseases in academia and in startups.
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Recently I lectured at the Congress of Future Medical Leaders about brain technology. It was incredibly energizing, and optimism-inspiring, to see 4,000 high school students excited about becoming physicians and/or biological scientists.
#futuredocsnow
@futuredocsnow
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Very honored to be a recipient of the Rumford Prize, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, for co-developing optogenetic tools -- congratulations to all the co-awardees. Link: (Image from .)
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An automatic patch clamp robot from Georgia Tech (
@craigrforest
lab) now tweets the data, whenever it gets a cell, all by itself.
I'm a neuroscience robot doing patch-clamping! Check out this cell I got at 4:59:24 PM!
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Just published: a detailed, step-by-step protocols paper on the most tried-and-true expansion microscopy protocols, with extensive advice on sample handling and imaging as well.
#expansionmicroscopy
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In science, whenever someone offers you advice, seriously visualize what would happen if you did the opposite. Since science is about discovering the unknown, the latter path is sometimes the better one.
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Friday afternoon in the Synthetic Neurobiology group... using chisels to break a 73 pound wheel of parmagiano reggiano into chunks for everyone. (A gift from our supporter Lisa Yang.)
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Multiple papers out today, in Nature Biotechnology and Nature Methods, from different groups, with new variants of expansion microscopy. Great to see the bio community adopt the idea and evolve it on its own!
#expansionmicroscopy
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One of the perks of taking a water taxi at midnight in Venice: not much traffic. On my way to San Servolo island, to lecture for the Neuroscience School of Advanced Studies tomorrow.
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"Mother and Child," by MIT Prof. Rebecca Saxe, in the McGovern Institute lobby.
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Combining expansion microscopy and lattice light sheet microscopy enables nanoscopy at mouse-cortical-thickness and whole-fly-brain scale. Some images of mouse cortex dendritic spines from the biorxiv preprint ().
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The optogenetic molecule Chrimson () is headed for human trials, with the first patient scheduled for treatment in the first quarter of 2018.
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As I work on this manuscript, I'm reminded of the Thomas Mann quote, "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
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Looking up the origin of the word idiot: Merriam-Webster's "examples of the word in a sentence" have gotten quite topical.
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Simultaneous optogenetics, and voltage imaging (using CoChR and SomArchon, respectively), in awake behaving mammalian hippocampus. From the preprint
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Hosting entrepreneur and three-term NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is at MIT today to give the commencement address, to see expanded brains, noninvasive brain stimulators, tools for precision stimulation and recording of neurons, and more.
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Showing Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau our expansion microscopy technology. Photo credit: Leanne Wang. (Via Louis Kang.)
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Expansion microscopy of the brainbow mouse hippocampus, rendered in real time (in collaboration with our Toshiba/NHK collaborators).
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Nature has a news article featuring many of the groups making major contributions to expansion microscopy, as well as to clearing technologies.
#expansionmicroscopy
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As professors, we should set the tone for scientific investigation, and highlight for our students something we don't understand every day.
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Next gen DNA sequencing has revolutionized biology. But what if you could sequence individual proteins? Here we propose, and mathematically evaluate, a concept of how to do that.
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Excited to be part of this collaboration led by Li-Huei Tsai at MIT. Just published in Cell: auditory stimulation combined with light flashes induced gamma oscillations in the brain, reduced amyloid, and improved memory in animal models of Alzheimer’s.
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Excited, and a little bit nervous, as we get ready to announce our MIT group's first major invention that is not in the biological or medical arenas...
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Delighted and thankful to receive the Croonian Medal of the Royal Society. This award recognizes work by many group members, alumni, and collaborators over the years, that made our neurotechnology work real and impactful.
@UTAustin
@UofGlasgow
The biological sciences are recognised with the Croonian Medal and Lecture. This year, Edward Boyden is awarded the prize for expanding our understanding of the brain and his work in optogenetics
#RSMedals
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A laser-cut brain artwork made by the U Toronto neuroscience undergraduates.
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My hope is that understanding the brain and the mind will ultimately allow humanity to enter a more enlightened state.
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Excited that we're gearing up to announce two new technologies -- an automated way to make new synthetic biology tools, and a new technique for seeing brain activity. Love that our lab constantly enters new areas. The overarching path: to do whatever it takes, to solve the brain.
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Temporally multiplexed imaging (TMI) helps ordinary microscopes image many dynamic signals in a living cell. Different signals are associated with fluorophores with different clocklike properties. A movie of a cell is unmixed to see individual signals.
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The embedding of tissues in hydrogels for microscopy was published in 1981. Thus, to innovate, read old papers, not just new ones. 2/2
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Very honored to have been named the
inaugural Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT. Grateful to Lisa Yang and Eva Tan for their visionary support.
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Neuro art, expansion microscopy of brain circuitry from our 2016 Nature Biotechnology paper, on the wall.
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If you stand up for noble ideals and take risks, we want you at MIT!
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#Expansionmicroscopy
helps see heat shock proteins (Timmerman, Baldwin, and Benesch labs, ), the pathogen Chlamydia trachomatis (Rudel lab, ), and a Drosophila larva (Preibisch lab, ). From the last paper:
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A real-time rendering system to visualize expansion microscopy/lattice light sheet datasets (), made by Toshiba Memory Corp & us. Credit: Y. Bando (Toshiba/MIT), K. Hiwada (Toshiba),
@Ruixuan3
,
@ShohAsano
,
@rxist525
, Y. Aso, E. Betzig, E. Boyden.
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In a collaboration led by
@DrLiHueiTsai
, and just published in Neuron: delivering visual stimuli at 40 Hz (gamma frequency) can reduce the loss of neurons in mouse models of neurodegeneration, and improves learning and memory too. The paper:
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Know someone who would benefit from $150k to have the freedom to do some adventurous science?
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This sculpture of a brain, made by sculptor Marton Varo, was made from marble from the same quarry used by Michelangelo. A gift from Marton and Paul Domb, co-founder of the Visual Snow Initiative.
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The office at CERN where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
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From Peng Yin's group at Harvard: how to see many kinds of protein in a biological specimen, one after the other, using DNA-barcoded antibodies that can be equipped with glowing dyes. Speeds up cycles of protein staining for expansion microscopy by 10x:
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Since big scientific discoveries/inventions sometimes begin from obscure, poorly appreciated observations, it'd be great to have a search engine for the most important, but unpopular, facts. An anti-Google, if you will. Is such a thing possible?
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Aha. If you look at the golden neurons in the McGovern Lobby from the right angle, they take the shape of a brain.
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Mapping out tiny cellular compartments, like mitochondria and lysosomes, in neurons of intact brain circuits may benefit from our new imaging technology (). Here's a brief clip from Movie 1 of our recent paper.
#expansionmicroscopy
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Led by Gül Dölen (with a little technology from us), and just published in Nature: "Oxytocin-dependent reopening of a social reward learning critical period with MDMA,"
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Awesome application of expansion microscopy to show that presynaptic terminals contain ribosomes - and make proteins! From Erin Schuman's lab.
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Sad to hear this. Paul was one of the very first supporters of our work at MIT to scalably observe the brain. Thanks for your vision and dedication to solving one of the great mysteries of our time.
Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and billionaire investor, dies at 65
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A bowtie featuring an expansion microscopy-processed brain circuit.
#expansionmicroscopy
#SciArt
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“Expansion microscopy at one nanometer resolution” - so fun to see the shapes of proteins, on an ordinary light microscope!
Hello world, ONE is here... I am happy to share with you a new technology —termed
#ONE_Microscopy
, that allows a resolution approaching ~8 Å using conventional light microscopy.
@LabSauer
@eboyden3
@RaduAricescu
Full story:
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The patent for temporal interference brain stimulation (our proposed method for noninvasive brain stimulation) has been granted -- congrats to the whole team working on this project!
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"The most important thing a professor can do is to make students feel that all the ideas were their own." -Marvin Minsky
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"Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order." -Sydney Brenner
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Some holiday reading :) Just published in Nature Methods (
@naturemethods
), our most comprehensive review to date on expansion microscopy, with discussions of many techniques and applications, as well as thoughts on the future!
#expansionmicroscopy
Link:
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The PDF for the paper "Cortical column and whole-brain imaging with molecular contrast and nanoscale resolution" is now posted here.
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Just posted a half-dozen new papers on our lab web page for free PDF download, including the new expansion microscopy protocols paper.
#expansionmicroscopy
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Just published (Neuron, May 8 2019) from
@AdamMarblestone
and myself, an essay: "How can engineers help invent tools for neuroscience? We here explore a model for how engineers can choose problems and map out possible technologies that help address them."
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Glass neuron sculptures at the UT Brainhealth Brain Performance Institute center launch gala.
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HHMI headquarters has portraits of their new investigators along their hallways. Takes a little getting used to...
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At Boston Logan airport's international terminal: a strong show of support for quantum physics.
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From
@arjunrajlab
in
@NatureBiotech
: Click-amplifying FISH (clampFISH), a method for fluorescence detection of nucleic acids with high specificity and >400-fold signal amplification. Useful for, amongst other things, expansion microscopy signal boosting.
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Some reading for the holidays: the incredible story of Lore Harp McGovern, who co-founded the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and in the 1970s, started one of the earliest PC companies.
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We should try to make the act of doing science feel more like carrying out a heist, breaking into the vault of secrets of the universe.
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Found this on the wall of the lab today. Glad we've cultivated a lab culture of thinking big.
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Anyone interested in helping launch a company to explore new kinds of noninvasive deep-targeted brain stimulation technology? Email me at esb
@media
.mit.edu. Some background:
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Want to apply for $250 million over 15 years, to solve a major problem in the life sciences, at
@HHMIJanelia
? Due March 1, 2019!
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With our directed evolution robot, we're excited to evolve some new fluorescent indicators of biological functions! Why can't we someday image every physiological process in the cell? Any requests for targets we should go after?
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When you lecture at the University of Rennes in their Frontiers series, they ask you to leave words of wisdom to the students, in a book signed by all the past speakers.
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Nature Neuroscience: just published today, "Temporally precise single-cell-resolution optogenetics,"
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Very honored to have been elected a 2017 fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Congrats to the entire class!
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To cure people, we need fewer moonshots -- and better understanding of the fundamental science:
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Last week we announced a way to 3-D print nanotechnology, by using lasers to pattern materials in 3-D, and then shrinking the specimen 1000x in volume (read the paper at ). Want to collaborate on an improvement or application of the technology? Contact me!
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With implosion fabrication (just published in Science, ), members of our group (led by Dan Oran,
@SGRodriques
,
@AdamMarblestone
) were able to shrink Alice in Wonderland more than Lewis Carroll did.
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Very honored to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. Reflects our lab members' great work!
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