CCB Colloquium – Professor Dingchang Lin, Johns Hopkins University

Electronic and molecular approaches for neural recording: deciphering the brain in space and time

Resolving neuronal activity in space and time is a long-sought capability in neuroscience, which is, however, still hard to achieve using existing technologies. In this talk, I will share with the audience our strategies toward this goal via innovations at the device and molecular levels. In the first part of my talk, I will start by introducing our recent development of ultra flexible neural probes that exhibit extraordinary biocompatibility and the capability of chronic single-unit recording. I will then share our new implantation modality that can nonlinearly deploy our probes into the brain with minimal surgical lesions. The modality allows conformal coverage of nonlinear brain structures or circuits using microelectrode arrays and therefore enables high-density neural recording along designated trajectories. In the second part of my talk, I will switch to our recent endeavors in developing protein “ticker tapes” for the longitudinal recording of cellular events. The technology exploits activity-dependent transcriptional activation to convert neural activities into fluorescently readable signals in cells. The signals can be recorded by protein nanodevices genetically encoded in individual cells for retrospective retrieval. This strategy provides an attainable path toward organ-wide longitudinal mapping at the single-cell level.