Assist.Prof. Ahmed Abdelfattah from Brown University is going to be at InFocus on February 26 at 14:00. The event will take place in person. You can attend the event in person in TTO (Technology Transfer Office) seminar room.
Voltage imaging provides unparalleled spatial and temporal resolution of the brain’s electrical signaling at the cellular and circuit levels. A longstanding challenge has been to develop genetically encoded voltage sensors to track membrane voltage from multiple neurons in behaving animals. However, brightness and signal to noise ratio have limited the utility of existing voltage sensors, especially in vivo. In addition, a major unresolved challenge has been to develop far-red voltage indicators, which would be spectrally compatible with optogenetic stimulation or co-imaging with GFP-based reporters. Existing far-red reporters are either very dim, or do not work well in vivo. In this talk, I will describe our efforts to develop improved far-red chemigenetic voltage indicators. Overall, my talk will demonstrate how proteins can be engineered into voltage indicators for functional analysis of the brain.
Assistant Professor
Brown University
Ahmed Abdelfattah is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Brown University. His research focus is on developing light-responsive, genetically encoded tools for reading and modulating brain activity at high spatiotemporal resolution. He applies these tools to generate a mechanistic description of how the brain carries out its functions through mapping functional connections and monitoring the activity of individual cells and neural circuits. Dr. Abdelfattah received his BS degree in Pharmacy and Biotechnology from the German University in Cairo, and his PhD degree in Chemistry from the University of Alberta. He then completed his postdoctoral research at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus where he engineered new chemigenetic probes for imaging brain activity. Dr. Abdelfattah is the recipient of multiple awards including the 2021 NIH New Innovator Award, the 2021 Searle Scholar Award, and the 2022 Rita Allen Scholar Award. and currently holds the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Endowed Professorship in Brain Science.