Venue: Centre Broca
School of Life Sciences, Peking University, China.
Invited by Daniel Choquet.
Dr. Yulong Li is a professor at the School of Life Sciences, Peking University. He received his B.S. from Peking University, Ph.D. in Neurobiology from Duke University, and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford. Since 2012, he has led a lab at Peking University focused on ‘synapse’, creating advanced optical probes to study the brain in space and time. His team developed GRAB sensors, a series of genetically encoded probes for in vivo imaging of neuromodulators such as acetylcholine, monoamines, lipids, and neuropeptides across species, enabling rapid, cell-specific detection in the nervous system.
Title
Spying on Neuromodulator Dynamics In Vivo by Constructing Multi-Color GRAB Sensors
Abstract
The human brain consists of billions of neurons, most of which communicate with each other by releasing different kinds of neuromodulators through chemical synapses, and therefore is able to control different physiological functions like perception, motion, learning and memory. To dissect the mechanism underlying how brain take part in different physiological functions and pathological conditions, it’s important to monitor the dynamics of neuromodulators in vivo. In the past few years, we and others have developed a series of multi-color GPCR-activation‒based (GRAB) sensors for monitoring extracellular neuromodulator dynamics with high sensitivity, specificity, and spatial-temporal resolution in living animals. In this report, I will share our recent progress in developing sensors for monitoring monoamines, nucleotides, neurolipids and neuropeptides. With these GRAB sensors, we have monitored the dynamics of neuromodulators in mice in a wide range of physiological processes (sleep-wake cycle, motion, etc.) and pathological conditions (epilepsy, etc.).