After some cool lectures and a lab tour, one of the PhD’s named Ton, asked Jerry Yang if he would sign the pictogram on the wall, and then asked what it stood for.
It jumped out at me – a semaphore for Y2E2, the abbreviated name of his building on the Stanford campus.
Ton works in Drew Endy’s lab and they recently published some cool results on creating a digital memory element in DNA. More precisely, it’s an SR Latch, and they are now building a byte-wide register.
Why would researchers want to do this? This could be used to count cell divisions to trace the embryonic development of an organism cell-by-cell. Or more radically, imagine if every cell has a unique ID, clocking at each cell division. Consider the brain. Imagine if that code could express a coded RNA that would migrate to the synapse, where it could bundle with other RNA from connecting neurons. In one destructive readout, you could shotgun sequence all of those RNA bundles and derive the full connectome of the brain in one step.
Here is the preprint of their PNAS paper. More cool stuff on biological circuits.
Karl Deisseroth spoke on his pioneering work on optogenetics. They take an optically-sensitive pathway from algae and add a promoter that is specific to a particular type of neuron in a mouse. Then they use a thin need to add this vector to a small region of the amygdala. While the new DNA is taken up by all of the neurons in that region, it will only be expressed in the particular type of neuron that corresponds to the promoter region. And the DNA will be read only when the light-trigger is present. So now, the mouse has a fiber optic leading to that region, and the experimenter can activate or inhibit a small number of neurons from an external switch.
In their latest work, they can switch the anxiety level of the mouse on and off at will. Karl concluded: “if anyone asks you the value of basic research, this is a great example. I would never have guessed that research on algae would shed new light on anxiety.”
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