Researcher: Guoping Feng

A brain circuit in the thalamus helps us hold information in mind

Anne Trafton |

As people age, their working memory often declines, making it more difficult to perform everyday tasks. One key brain region linked to this type of memory is the anterior thalamus, which is primarily involved in spatial memory — memory of our surroundings and how to navigate them.

In a study of mice, MIT researchers have identified a circuit in the anterior thalamus that is necessary for remembering how to navigate a maze. The researchers also found that this circuit is weakened in older mice, but enhancing its activity greatly improves their ability to run the maze correctly.

This region could offer a promising target for treatments that could help reverse memory loss in older people, without affecting other parts of the brain, the researchers say.

“By understanding how the thalamus controls cortical output, hopefully we could find more specific and druggable targets in this area, instead of generally modulating the prefrontal cortex, which has many different functions,” says Guoping Feng, the James W. and Patricia T. Poitras Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and the associate director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.

Feng is the senior author of the study, which appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dheeraj Roy, a NIH K99 Awardee and a McGovern Fellow at the Broad Institute, and Ying Zhang, a J. Douglas Tan Postdoctoral Fellow at the McGovern Institute, are the lead authors of the paper.

Spatial memory

The thalamus, a small structure located near the center of the brain, contributes to working memory and many other executive functions, such as planning and attention. Feng’s lab has recently been investigating a region of the thalamus known as the anterior thalamus, which has important roles in memory and spatial navigation.

Previous studies in mice have shown that damage to the anterior thalamus leads to impairments in spatial working memory. In humans, studies have revealed age-related decline in anterior thalamus activity, which is correlated with lower performance on spatial memory tasks.

The anterior thalamus is divided into three sections: ventral, dorsal, and medial. In a study published last year, Feng, Roy and Zhang studied the role of the anterodorsal (AD) thalamus and anteroventral (AV) thalamus in memory formation. They found that the AD thalamus is involved in creating mental maps of physical spaces, while the AV thalamus helps the brain to distinguish these memories from other memories of similar spaces.

In their new study, the researchers wanted to look more deeply at the AV thalamus, exploring its role in a spatial working memory task. To do that, they trained mice to run a simple T-shaped maze. At the beginning of each trial, the mice ran until they reached the T. One arm was blocked off, forcing them to run down the other arm. Then, the mice were placed in the maze again, with both arms open. The mice were rewarded if they chose the opposite arm from the first run. This meant that in order to make the correct decision, they had to remember which way they had turned on the previous run.

As the mice performed the task, the researchers used optogenetics to inhibit activity of either AV or AD neurons during three different parts of the task: the sample phase, which occurs during the first run; the delay phase, while they are waiting for the second run to begin; and the choice phase, when the mice make their decision which way to turn during the second run.

The researchers found that inhibiting AV neurons during the sample or choice phases had no effect on the mice’s performance, but when they suppressed AV activity during the delay phase, which lasted 10 seconds or longer, the mice performed much worse on the task.

This suggests that the AV neurons are most important for keeping information in mind while it is needed for a task. In contrast, inhibiting the AD neurons disrupted performance during the sample phase but had little effect during the delay phase. This finding was consistent with the research team’s earlier study showing that AD neurons are involved in forming memories of a physical space.

“The anterior thalamus in general is a spatial learning region, but the ventral neurons seem to be needed in this maintenance period, during this short delay,” Roy says. “Now we have two subdivisions within the anterior thalamus: one that seems to help with contextual learning and the other that actually helps with holding this information.”

Age-related decline

The researchers then tested the effects of age on this circuit. They found that older mice (14 months) performed worse on the T-maze task and their AV neurons were less excitable. However, when the researchers artificially stimulated those neurons, the mice’s performance on the task dramatically improved.

Another way to enhance performance in this memory task is to stimulate the prefrontal cortex, which also undergoes age-related decline. However, activating the prefrontal cortex also increases measures of anxiety in the mice, the researchers found.

“If we directly activate neurons in medial prefrontal cortex, it will also elicit anxiety-related behavior, but this will not happen during AV activation,” Zhang says. “That is an advantage of activating AV compared to prefrontal cortex.”

If a noninvasive or minimally invasive technology could be used to stimulate those neurons in the human brain, it could offer a way to help prevent age-related memory decline, the researchers say. They are now planning to perform single-cell RNA sequencing of neurons of the anterior thalamus to find genetic signatures that could be used to identify cells that would make the best targets.

The research was funded, in part, by the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT, and the James and Patricia Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research at MIT.

Five MIT faculty elected 2021 AAAS Fellows

by MIT News Office |

Five MIT faculty members have been elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The 2021 class of AAAS Fellows includes 564 scientists, engineers, and innovators spanning 24 scientific disciplines who are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.

Mircea Dincă is the W. M. Keck Professor of Energy in the Department of Chemistry. His group’s research focuses on addressing challenges related to the storage and consumption of energy, and global environmental concerns. Central to these efforts are the synthesis of novel organic-inorganic hybrid materials and the manipulation of their electrochemical and photophysical properties, with a current emphasis on porous materials and extended one-dimensional van der Waals materials.

Guoping Feng is the James W. and Patricia T. Poitras Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, associate director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, director of Model Systems and Neurobiology at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, and an institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research is devoted to understanding the development and function of synapses in the brain and how synaptic dysfunction may contribute to neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. By understanding the molecular, cellular, and circuitry mechanisms of these disorders, Feng hopes his work will eventually lead to the development of new and effective treatments for the millions of people suffering from these devastating diseases.

David Shoemaker is a senior research scientist with the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. His work is focused on gravitational-wave observation and includes developing technologies for the detectors (LIGO, LISA), developing proposals for new instruments (Cosmic Explorer), managing the teams to build them and the consortia which exploit the data (LIGO Scientific Collaboration, LISA Consortium), and supporting the overall growth of the field (Gravitational-Wave International Committee).

Ian Hunter is the Hatsopoulos Professor of Mechanical Engineering and runs the Bioinstrumentation Lab at MIT. His main areas of research are instrumentation, microrobotics, medical devices, and biomimetic materials. Over the years he and his students have developed many instruments and devices including: confocal laser microscopes, scanning tunneling electron microscopes, miniature mass spectrometers, new forms of Raman spectroscopy, needle-free drug delivery technologies, nano- and micro-robots, microsurgical robots, robotic endoscopes, high-performance Lorentz force motors, and microarray technologies for massively parallel chemical and biological assays.

Evelyn N. Wang is the Ford Professor of Engineering and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Her research program combines fundamental studies of micro/nanoscale heat and mass transport processes with the development of novel engineered structures to create innovative solutions in thermal management, energy, and water harvesting systems. Her work in thermophotovoltaics was named to Technology Review’s lists of Biggest Clean Energy Advances, in 2016, and Ten Breakthrough Technologies, in 2017, and to the Department of Energy Frontiers Research Center’s Ten of Ten awards. Her work extracting water from air has won her the title of 2017 Foreign Policy’s Global ReThinker and the 2018 Eighth Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water.

Some brain disorders exhibit similar circuit malfunctions

Anne Trafton |

Many neurodevelopmental disorders share similar symptoms, such as learning disabilities or attention deficits. A new study from MIT has uncovered a common neural mechanism for a type of cognitive impairment seen in some people with autism and schizophrenia, even though the genetic variations that produce the impairments are different for each condition.

In a study of mice, the researchers found that certain genes that are mutated or missing in some people with those disorders cause similar dysfunctions in a neural circuit in the thalamus. If scientists could develop drugs that target this circuit, they could be used to treat people who have different disorders with common behavioral symptoms, the researchers say.

“This study reveals a new circuit mechanism for cognitive impairment and points to a future direction for developing new therapeutics, by dividing patients into specific groups not by their behavioral profile, but by the underlying neurobiological mechanisms,” says Guoping Feng, the James W. and Patricia T. Poitras Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, the associate director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and the senior author of the new study.

Dheeraj Roy, a Warren Alpert Distinguished Scholar and a McGovern Fellow at the Broad Institute, and Ying Zhang, a postdoc at the McGovern Institute, are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Neuron.

Thalamic connections

The thalamus plays a key role in cognitive tasks such as memory formation and learning. Previous studies have shown that many of the gene variants linked to brain disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are highly expressed in the thalamus, suggesting that it may play a role in those disorders.

One such gene is called Ptchd1, which Feng has studied extensively. In boys, loss of this gene, which is carried on the X chromosome, can lead to attention deficits, hyperactivity, aggression, intellectual disability, and autism spectrum disorders.

In a study published in 2016, Feng and his colleagues showed that Ptchd1 exerts many of its effects in a part of the thalamus called the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN). When the gene is knocked out in the TRN of mice, the mice show attention deficits and hyperactivity. However, that study did not find any role for the TRN in the learning disabilities also seen in people with mutations in Ptchd1.

In the new study, the researchers decided to look elsewhere in the thalamus to try to figure out how Ptchd1 loss might affect learning and memory. Another area they identified that highly expresses Ptchd1 is called the anterodorsal (AD) thalamus, a tiny region that is involved in spatial learning and communicates closely with the hippocampus.

Using novel techniques that allowed them to trace the connections between the AD thalamus and another brain region called the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), the researchers determined a key function of this circuit. They found that in mice, the AD-to-RSC circuit is essential for encoding fearful memories of a chamber in which they received a mild foot shock. It is also necessary for working memory, such as creating mental maps of physical spaces to help in decision-making.

The researchers found that a nearby part of the thalamus called the anteroventral (AV) thalamus also plays a role in this memory formation process: AV-to-RSC communication regulates the specificity of the encoded memory, which helps us distinguish this memory from others of similar nature.

“These experiments showed that two neighboring subdivisions in the thalamus contribute differentially to memory formation, which is not what we expected,” Roy says.

Circuit malfunction

Once the researchers discovered the roles of the AV and AD thalamic regions in memory formation, they began to investigate how this circuit is affected by loss of Ptchd1. When they knocked down expression of Ptchd1 in neurons of the AD thalamus, they found a striking deficit in memory encoding, for both fearful memories and working memory.

The researchers then did the same experiments with a series of four other genes — one that is linked with autism and three linked with schizophrenia. In all of these mice, they found that knocking down gene expression produced the same memory impairments. They also found that each of these knockdowns produced hyperexcitability in neurons of the AD thalamus.

These results are consistent with existing theories that learning occurs through the strengthening of synapses that occurs as a memory is formed, the researchers say.

“The dominant theory in the field is that when an animal is learning, these neurons have to fire more, and that increase correlates with how well you learn,” Zhang says. “Our simple idea was if a neuron fires too high at baseline, you may lack a learning-induced increase.”

The researchers demonstrated that each of the genes they studied affects different ion channels that influence neurons’ firing rates. The overall effect of each mutation is an increase in neuron excitability, which leads to the same circuit-level dysfunction and behavioral symptoms.

The researchers also showed that they could restore normal cognitive function in mice with these genetic mutations by artificially turning down hyperactivity in neurons of the AD thalamus. The approach they used, chemogenetics, is not yet approved for use in humans. However, it may be possible to target this circuit in other ways, the researchers say.

The findings lend support to the idea that grouping diseases by the circuit malfunctions that underlie them may help to identify potential drug targets that could help many patients, Feng says.

“There are so many genetic factors and environmental factors that can contribute to a particular disease, but in the end, it has to cause some type of neuronal change that affects a circuit or a few circuits involved in this behavior,” he says. “From a therapeutic point of view, in such cases you may not want to go after individual molecules because they may be unique to a very small percentage of patients, but at a higher level, at the cellular or circuit level, patients may have more commonalities.”

The research was funded by the Stanley Center at the Broad Institute, the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT, the James and Patricia Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research at MIT, and the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative.

New technique corrects disease-causing mutations

by Jill Crittenden |

Gene editing, or purposefully changing a gene’s DNA sequence, is a powerful tool for studying how mutations cause disease, and for making changes in an individual’s DNA for therapeutic purposes. A novel method of gene editing that can be used for both purposes has now been developed by a team led by Guoping Feng, the James W. (1963) and Patricia T. Poitras Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

“This technical advance can accelerate the production of disease models in animals and, critically, opens up a brand-new methodology for correcting disease-causing mutations,” says Feng, who is also a member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and the associate director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. The new findings publish online May 26 and in print June 10 in the journal Cell.

Genetic models of disease

A major goal of the Feng lab is to precisely define what goes wrong in neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders by engineering animal models that carry the gene mutations that cause these disorders in humans. New models can be generated by injecting embryos with gene editing tools, along with a piece of DNA carrying the desired mutation.

In one such method, the gene editing tool CRISPR is programmed to cut a targeted gene, thereby activating natural DNA mechanisms that “repair” the broken gene with the injected template DNA. The engineered cells are then used to generate offspring capable of passing the genetic change on to further generations, creating a stable genetic line in which the disease, and therapies, are tested.

Although CRISPR has accelerated the process of generating such disease models, the process can still take months or years. Reasons for the inefficiency are that many treated cells do not undergo the desired DNA sequence change at all, and the change only occurs on one of the two gene copies (for most genes, each cell contains two versions, one from the father and one from the mother).

In an effort to increase the efficiency of the gene editing process, the Feng lab team initially hypothesized that adding a DNA repair protein called RAD51 to a standard mixture of CRISPR gene editing tools would increase the chances that a cell (in this case a fertilized mouse egg, or one-cell embryo) would undergo the desired genetic change.

As a test case, they measured the rate at which they were able to insert (“knock-in”) a mutation in the gene Chd2 that is associated with autism.  The overall proportion of embryos that were correctly edited remained unchanged, but to their surprise, a significantly higher percentage carried the desired gene edit on both chromosomes. Tests with a different gene yielded the same unexpected outcome.

“Editing of both chromosomes simultaneously is normally very uncommon,” explains postdoctoral fellow Jonathan Wilde.  “The high rate of editing seen with RAD51 was really striking and what started as a simple attempt to make mutant Chd2 mice quickly turned into a much bigger project focused on RAD51 and its applications in genome editing,” said Wilde, who co-authored the Cell paper with research scientist Tomomi Aida.

A molecular copy machine

The Feng lab team next set out to understand the mechanism by which RAD51 enhances gene editing. They hypothesized that RAD51 engages a process called interhomolog repair (IHR), whereby a DNA break on one chromosome is repaired using the second copy of the chromosome (from the other parent) as the template.

To test this, they injected mouse embryos with RAD51 and CRISPR but left out the template DNA. They programmed CRISPR to cut only the gene sequence on one of the chromosomes, and then tested whether it was repaired to match the sequence on the uncut chromosome. For this experiment, they had to use mice in which the sequences on the maternal and paternal chromosomes were different.

They found that control embryos injected with CRISPR alone rarely showed IHR repair. However, addition of RAD51 significantly increased the number of embryos in which the CRISPR-targeted gene was edited to match the uncut chromosome.

“Previous studies of IHR found that it is incredibly inefficient in most cells,” says Wilde. “Our finding that it occurs much more readily in embryonic cells and can be enhanced by RAD51 suggest that a deeper understanding of what makes the embryo permissive to this type of DNA repair could help us design safer and more efficient gene therapies.”

A new way to correct disease-causing mutations          

Standard gene therapy strategies that rely on injecting a corrective piece of DNA to serve as a template for repairing the mutation engage a process called homology-directed repair (HDR).

“HDR-based strategies still suffer from low efficiency and carry the risk of unwanted integration of donor DNA throughout the genome,” explains Feng. “IHR has the potential to overcome these problems because it relies upon natural cellular pathways and the patient’s own normal chromosome for correction of the deleterious mutation.”

Feng’s team went on to identify additional DNA repair-associated proteins that can stimulate IHR, including several that not only promote high levels of IHR, but also repress errors in the DNA repair process. Additional experiments that allowed the team to examine the genomic features of IHR events gave deeper insight into the mechanism of IHR and suggested ways that the technique can be used to make gene therapies safer.

“While there is still a great deal to learn about this new application of IHR, our findings are the foundation for a new gene therapy approach that could help solve some of the big problems with current approaches,” says Aida.

This study was supported by the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT, the Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research at MIT, NIH/NIMH Conte Center Grant (P50 MH094271) and NIH Office of the Director (U24 OD026638).

New neuron type discovered only in primate brains

by Stephanie M. McPherson |

Neuropsychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia and autism are a complex interplay of brain chemicals, environment, and genetics that requires careful study to understand the root causes. Scientists have traditionally relied on samples taken from mice and non-human primates to study how these diseases develop. But the question has lingered: are the brains of these subjects similar enough to humans to yield useful insights?

Now work from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research is pointing towards an answer. In a study published in Nature, researchers from the Broad’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research report several key differences in the brains of ferrets, mice, nonhuman primates, and humans, all focused on a type of neuron called interneurons. Most surprisingly, the team found a new type of interneuron only in primates, located in a part of the brain called the striatum, which is associated with Huntington’s disease and potentially schizophrenia.

The findings could help accelerate research into causes of and treatments for neuropsychiatric illnesses, by helping scientists choose the lab model that best mimics features of the human brain that may be involved in these diseases.

“The data from this work will inform the study of human brain disorders because it helps us think about which features of the human brain can be studied in mice, which features require higher organisms such as marmosets, and why mouse models often don’t reflect the effects of the corresponding mutations in human,” said Steven McCarroll, senior author of the study, director of genetics at the Stanley Center, and a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

“Dysfunctions of interneurons have been strongly linked to several brain disorders including autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia,” said Guoping Feng, co-author of the study, director of model systems and neurobiology at the Stanley Center, and professor of neuroscience at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “These data further demonstrate the unique importance of non-human primate models in understanding neurobiological mechanisms of brain disorders and in developing and testing therapeutic approaches.”

Enter the interneuron

Interneurons form key nodes within neural circuitry in the brain, and help regulate neuronal activity by releasing the neurotransmitter GABA, which inhibits the firing of other neurons.

Fenna Krienen, a postdoctoral fellow in the McCarroll Lab and first author on the Nature paper, and her colleagues wanted to track the natural history of interneurons.

“We wanted to gain an understanding of the evolutionary trajectory of the cell types that make up the brain,” said Krienen. “And then we went about acquiring samples from species that could inform this understanding of evolutionary divergence between humans and the models that so often stand in for humans in neuroscience studies.”

One of the tools the researchers used was Drop-seq, a high-throughput single nucleus RNA sequencing technique developed by McCarroll’s lab, to classify the roles and locations of more than 184,000 telencephalic interneurons in the brains of ferrets, humans, macaques, marmosets, and mice. Using tissue from frozen samples, the team isolated the nuclei of interneurons from the cortex, the hippocampus, and the striatum, and profiled the RNA from the cells.

The researchers thought that because interneurons are found in all vertebrates, the cells would be relatively static from species to species.

“But with these sensitive measurements and a lot of data from the various species, we got a different picture about how lively interneurons are, in terms of the ways that evolution has tweaked their programs or their populations from one species to the next,” said Krienen.

She and her collaborators identified four main differences in interneurons between the species they studied: the cells change their proportions across brain regions, alter the programs they use to link up with other neurons, and can migrate to different regions of the brain.

But most strikingly, the scientists discovered that primates have a novel interneuron not found in other species. The interneuron is located in the striatum—the brain structure responsible for cognition, reward, and coordinated movements that has existed as far back on the evolutionary tree as ancient primitive fish. The researchers were amazed to find the new neuron type made up a third of all interneurons in the striatum.

“Although we expected the big innovations in human and primate brains to be in the cerebral cortex, which we tend to associate with human intelligence, it was in fact in the venerable striatum that Fenna uncovered the most dramatic cellular innovation in the primate brain,” said McCarroll. “This cell type had never been discovered before, because mice have nothing like it.”

“The question of what provides the “human advantage” in cognitive abilities is one of the fundamental issues neurobiologists have endeavored to answer,” said Gordon Fishell, group leader at the Stanley Center, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, and a collaborator on the study. “These findings turn on end the question of ‘how do we build better brains?’. It seems at least part of the answer stems from creating a new list of parts.”

A better understanding of how these inhibitory neurons vary between humans and lab models will provide researchers with new tools for investigating various brain disorders. Next, the researchers will build on this work to determine the specific functions of each type of interneuron.

“In studying neurodevelopmental disorders, you would like to be convinced that your model is an appropriate one for really complex social behaviors,” Krienen said. “And the major overarching theme of the study was that primates in general seem to be very similar to one another in all of those interneuron innovations.”

Support for this work was provided in part by the Broad Institute’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research and the NIH Brain Initiative, the Dean’s Innovation Award (Harvard Medical School), the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT, the Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research at MIT, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

New molecular therapeutics center established at MIT’s McGovern Institute

by Julie Pryor |

More than one million Americans are diagnosed with a chronic brain disorder each year, yet effective treatments for most complex brain disorders are inadequate or even nonexistent.

A major new research effort at MIT’s McGovern Institute aims to change how we treat brain disorders by developing innovative molecular tools that precisely target dysfunctional genetic, molecular, and circuit pathways.

The K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics in Neuroscience was established at MIT through a $28 million gift from philanthropist Lisa Yang and MIT alumnus Hock Tan ’75. Yang is a former investment banker who has devoted much of her time to advocacy for individuals with disabilities and autism spectrum disorders. Tan is President and CEO of Broadcom, a global technology infrastructure company. This latest gift brings Yang and Tan’s total philanthropy to MIT to more than $72 million.

Lisa Yang (center) and MIT alumnus Hock Tan ’75 with their daughter Eva (far left) pictured at the opening of the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research in 2017. Photo: Justin Knight

“In the best MIT spirit, Lisa and Hock have always focused their generosity on insights that lead to real impact,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “Scientifically, we stand at a moment when the tools and insights to make progress against major brain disorders are finally within reach. By accelerating the development of promising treatments, the new center opens the door to a hopeful new future for all those who suffer from these disorders and those who love them. I am deeply grateful to Lisa and Hock for making MIT the home of this pivotal research.”

Engineering with precision

Research at the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics in Neuroscience will initially focus on three major lines of investigation: genetic engineering using CRISPR tools, delivery of genetic and molecular cargo across the blood-brain barrier, and the translation of basic research into the clinical setting. The center will serve as a hub for researchers with backgrounds ranging from biological engineering and genetics to computer science and medicine.

“Developing the next generation of molecular therapeutics demands collaboration among researchers with diverse backgrounds,” says Robert Desimone, McGovern Institute Director and Doris and Don Berkey Professor of Neuroscience at MIT. “I am confident that the multidisciplinary expertise convened by this center will revolutionize how we improve our health and fight disease in the coming decade. Although our initial focus will be on the brain and its relationship to the body, many of the new therapies could have other health applications.”

There are an estimated 19,000 to 22,000 genes in the human genome and a third of those genes are active in the brain–the highest proportion of genes expressed in any part of the body.

Variations in genetic code have been linked to many complex brain disorders, including depression and Parkinson’s. Emerging genetic technologies, such as the CRISPR gene editing platform pioneered by McGovern Investigator Feng Zhang, hold great potential in both targeting and fixing these errant genes. But the safe and effective delivery of this genetic cargo to the brain remains a challenge.

Researchers within the new Yang-Tan Center will improve and fine-tune CRISPR gene therapies and develop innovative ways of delivering gene therapy cargo into the brain and other organs. In addition, the center will leverage newly developed single cell analysis technologies that are revealing cellular targets for modulating brain functions with unprecedented precision, opening the door for noninvasive neuromodulation as well as the development of medicines. The center will also focus on developing novel engineering approaches to delivering small molecules and proteins from the bloodstream into the brain. Desimone will direct the center and some of the initial research initiatives will be led by Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Polina Anikeeva; Ed Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT; Guoping Feng, the James W. (1963) and Patricia T. Poitras Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT; and Feng Zhang, James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT.

Building a research hub

“My goal in creating this center is to cement the Cambridge and Boston region as the global epicenter of next-generation therapeutics research. The novel ideas I have seen undertaken at MIT’s McGovern Institute and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard leave no doubt in my mind that major therapeutic breakthroughs for mental illness, neurodegenerative disease, autism and epilepsy are just around the corner,” says Yang.

Center funding will also be earmarked to create the Y. Eva Tan Fellows program, named for Tan and Yang’s daughter Eva, which will support fellowships for young neuroscientists and engineers eager to design revolutionary treatments for human diseases.

“We want to build a strong pipeline for tomorrow’s scientists and neuroengineers,” explains Hock Tan. “We depend on the next generation of bright young minds to help improve the lives of people suffering from chronic illnesses, and I can think of no better place to provide the very best education and training than MIT.”

The molecular therapeutics center is the second research center established by Yang and Tan at MIT. In 2017, they launched the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research, and, two years later, they created a sister center at Harvard Medical School, with the unique strengths of each institution converging toward a shared goal: understanding the basic biology of autism and how genetic and environmental influences converge to give rise to the condition, then translating those insights into novel treatment approaches.

All tools developed at the molecular therapeutics center will be shared globally with academic and clinical researchers with the goal of bringing one or more novel molecular tools to human clinical trials by 2025.

“We are hopeful that our centers, located in the heart of the Cambridge-Boston biotech ecosystem, will spur further innovation and fuel critical new insights to our understanding of health and disease,” says Yang.

 

Mapping the brain’s sensory gatekeeper

Anne Trafton |

Many people with autism experience sensory hypersensitivity, attention deficits, and sleep disruption. One brain region that has been implicated in these symptoms is the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN), which is believed to act as a gatekeeper for sensory information flowing to the cortex.

A team of researchers from MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has now mapped the TRN in unprecedented detail, revealing that the region contains two distinct subnetworks of neurons with different functions. The findings could offer researchers more specific targets for designing drugs that could alleviate some of the sensory, sleep, and attention symptoms of autism, says Guoping Feng, one of the leaders of the research team.

These cross-sections of the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) show two distinct populations of neurons, labeled in purple and green. A team of researchers from MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has now mapped the TRN in unprecedented detail.
Image: courtesy of the researchers

“The idea is that you could very specifically target one group of neurons, without affecting the whole brain and other cognitive functions,” says Feng, the James W. and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Feng; Zhanyan Fu, associate director of neurobiology at the Broad Institute’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research; and Joshua Levin, a senior group leader at the Broad Institute, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature. The paper’s lead authors are former MIT postdoc Yinqing Li, former Broad Institute postdoc Violeta Lopez-Huerta, and Broad Institute research scientist Xian Adiconis.

Distinct populations

When sensory input from the eyes, ears, or other sensory organs arrives in our brains, it goes first to the thalamus, which then relays it to the cortex for higher-level processing. Impairments of these thalamo-cortical circuits can lead to attention deficits, hypersensitivity to noise and other stimuli, and sleep problems.

One of the major pathways that controls information flow between the thalamus and the cortex is the TRN, which is responsible for blocking out distracting sensory input. In 2016, Feng and MIT Assistant Professor Michael Halassa, who is also an author of the new Nature paper, discovered that loss of a gene called Ptchd1 significantly affects TRN function. In boys, loss of this gene, which is carried on the X chromosome, can lead to attention deficits, hyperactivity, aggression, intellectual disability, and autism spectrum disorders.

In that study, the researchers found that when the Ptchd1 gene was knocked out in mice, the animals showed many of the same behavioral defects seen in human patients. When it was knocked out only in the TRN, the mice showed only hyperactivity, attention deficits, and sleep disruption, suggesting that the TRN is responsible for those symptoms.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to try to learn more about the specific types of neurons found in the TRN, in hopes of finding new ways to treat hyperactivity and attention deficits. Currently, those symptoms are most often treated with stimulant drugs such as Ritalin, which have widespread effects throughout the brain.

“Our goal was to find some specific ways to modulate the function of thalamo-cortical output and relate it to neurodevelopmental disorders,” Feng says. “We decided to try using single-cell technology to dissect out what cell types are there, and what genes are expressed. Are there specific genes that are druggable as a target?”

To explore that possibility, the researchers sequenced the messenger RNA molecules found in neurons of the TRN, which reveals genes that are being expressed in those cells. This allowed them to identify hundreds of genes that could be used to differentiate the cells into two subpopulations, based on how strongly they express those particular genes.

They found that one of these cell populations is located in the core of the TRN, while the other forms a very thin layer surrounding the core. These two populations also form connections to different parts of the thalamus, the researchers found. Based on those connections, the researchers hypothesize that cells in the core are involved in relaying sensory information to the brain’s cortex, while cells in the outer layer appear to help coordinate information that comes in through different senses, such as vision and hearing.

“Druggable targets”

The researchers now plan to study the varying roles that these two populations of neurons may have in a variety of neurological symptoms, including attention deficits, hypersensitivity, and sleep disruption. Using genetic and optogenetic techniques, they hope to determine the effects of activating or inhibiting different TRN cell types, or genes expressed in those cells.

“That can help us in the future really develop specific druggable targets that can potentially modulate different functions,” Feng says. “Thalamo-cortical circuits control many different things, such as sensory perception, sleep, attention, and cognition, and it may be that these can be targeted more specifically.”

This approach could also be useful for treating attention or hypersensitivity disorders even when they aren’t caused by defects in TRN function, the researchers say.

“TRN is a target where if you enhance its function, you might be able to correct problems caused by impairments of the thalamo-cortical circuits,” Feng says. “Of course we are far away from the development of any kind of treatment, but the potential is that we can use single-cell technology to not only understand how the brain organizes itself, but also how brain functions can be segregated, allowing you to identify much more specific targets that modulate specific functions.”

The research was funded by the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT, the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT, the James and Patricia Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research at MIT, the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, the National Institutes of Health/National Institute for Mental Health, the Klarman Cell Observatory at the Broad Institute, the Pew Foundation, and the Human Frontiers Science Program.

Optogenetics with SOUL

by Sabbi Lall |

Optogenetics has revolutionized neurobiology, allowing researchers to use light to activate or deactivate neurons that are genetically modified to express a light-sensitive channel. This ability to manipulate neuron activity has allowed causal testing of the function of specific neurons, and also has therapeutic potential to reduce symptoms in brain disorders. However, activating neurons deep within a given brain, especially a large primate brain but even a small mouse brain, is challenging and currently requires implanting fibers that could cause damage or inflammation.

McGovern Investigator Guoping Feng and colleagues have now overcome this challenge, developing optogenetic tools that allow non-invasive stimulation of neurons in the deep brain.

“Neuroscientists have dreamed of methods to turn neurons on and off, to understand the function of different neurons, but also to repair brain malfunctions that lead to psychiatric disorders, and optogenetics made this possible” explained Feng, the James W. (1963) and Patricia T. Poitras Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “We were trying to improve the light sensitivity of optogenetic tools to broaden applications.”

Engineering with light

In order to stimulate neurons with minimal invasiveness, Feng and colleagues engineered a new type of opsin. The original breakthrough optogenetics protocol used channelrhodopsin, a light-sensitive channel discovered in algae. By expressing this channel in neurons, light of the right wavelength can be used to activate the neuron in a dish or in vivo. However, in vivo application requires the implantation of optical fibers to deliver the light close to the specific brain region being stimulated, especially if the target region is in the deep brain. In addition, if the neuron being targeted is in the deep brain, it is hard for light to reach the region in the absence of invasive tools that can damage tissue and impact the behavior of the animal.

Our study creates a method that can activate any mouse brain region, independent of its location, non-invasively.

“Prior to our study, a few studies have contributed in various ways to the development of optogenetic stimulation methods that would be minimally invasive to the brain. However, all of these studies had various limitations in the extent of brain regions they could activate,” said co-senior study author Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute and the Doris and Don Berkey Professor of Neuroscience at MIT.

Probing the brain with SOUL

Feng and colleagues turned instead to new opsins, in particular SOUL, a new type of opsin that is very sensitive to even low-level light. The Feng group engineered this opsin, based on SSFO a second generation optogenetics tool, to have increased light sensitivity, and took advantage of a second property: that SOUL is activated in multiple steps, and once activated, it stays active for longer than other commonly used opsins. This means that a burst of a few seconds of low-level light can cause neurons to stay active for 10-30 minutes.

In order to put SOUL through its paces, the Feng lab expressed this channel in the lateral hypothalamus of the mouse brain. This is a deep region, challenging to reach with light, but with neurons that have clear functions that will lead to changes in behavior. Feng’s group was able to turn on this region non-invasively with light from outside the skull, and cause changes in feeding behavior.

“We were really surprised that SOUL was able to activate one of the deepest areas in the mouse brain, the lateral hypothalamus, which is 6 mm deep,” explains Feng.

But there were more surprises. When the authors activated a region of the primate brain using SOUL, they saw oscillations, waves of synchronized neuronal activity coming together like a choir. Such waves are believed to be important for many brain functions, and this result suggests that the new opsin can manipulate these brain waves, allowing scientists to study their role in the brain.

The authors are planning to move the study in several directions, studying models of brain disorders to identify circuits that may be suitable targets for therapy, as well as moving the methodology so that it can be used beyond the superficial cortex in larger animals. While it is too early to discuss applying the system to humans, the research brings us one step closer to future treatment of neurological disorders.

The neural basis of sensory hypersensitivity

Anne Trafton |

Many people with autism spectrum disorders are highly sensitive to light, noise, and other sensory input. A new study in mice reveals a neural circuit that appears to underlie this hypersensitivity, offering a possible strategy for developing new treatments.

MIT and Brown University neuroscientists found that mice lacking a protein called Shank3, which has been previously linked with autism, were more sensitive to a touch on their whiskers than genetically normal mice. These Shank3-deficient mice also had overactive excitatory neurons in a region of the brain called the somatosensory cortex, which the researchers believe accounts for their over-reactivity.

There are currently no treatments for sensory hypersensitivity, but the researchers believe that uncovering the cellular basis of this sensitivity may help scientists to develop potential treatments.

“We hope our studies can point us to the right direction for the next generation of treatment development,” says Guoping Feng, the James W. and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Feng and Christopher Moore, a professor of neuroscience at Brown University, are the senior authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Neuroscience. McGovern Institute research scientist Qian Chen and Brown postdoc Christopher Deister are the lead authors of the study.

Too much excitation

The Shank3 protein is important for the function of synapses — connections that allow neurons to communicate with each other. Feng has previously shown that mice lacking the Shank3 gene display many traits associated with autism, including avoidance of social interaction, and compulsive, repetitive behavior.

In the new study, Feng and his colleagues set out to study whether these mice also show sensory hypersensitivity. For mice, one of the most important sources of sensory input is the whiskers, which help them to navigate and to maintain their balance, among other functions.

The researchers developed a way to measure the mice’s sensitivity to slight deflections of their whiskers, and then trained the mutant Shank3 mice and normal (“wild-type”) mice to display behaviors that signaled when they felt a touch to their whiskers. They found that mice that were missing Shank3 accurately reported very slight deflections that were not noticed by the normal mice.

“They are very sensitive to weak sensory input, which barely can be detected by wild-type mice,” Feng says. “That is a direct indication that they have sensory over-reactivity.”

Once they had established that the mutant mice experienced sensory hypersensitivity, the researchers set out to analyze the underlying neural activity. To do that, they used an imaging technique that can measure calcium levels, which indicate neural activity, in specific cell types.

They found that when the mice’s whiskers were touched, excitatory neurons in the somatosensory cortex were overactive. This was somewhat surprising because when Shank3 is missing, synaptic activity should drop. That led the researchers to hypothesize that the root of the problem was low levels of Shank3 in the inhibitory neurons that normally turn down the activity of excitatory neurons. Under that hypothesis, diminishing those inhibitory neurons’ activity would allow excitatory neurons to go unchecked, leading to sensory hypersensitivity.

To test this idea, the researchers genetically engineered mice so that they could turn off Shank3 expression exclusively in inhibitory neurons of the somatosensory cortex. As they had suspected, they found that in these mice, excitatory neurons were overactive, even though those neurons had normal levels of Shank3.

“If you only delete Shank3 in the inhibitory neurons in the somatosensory cortex, and the rest of the brain and the body is normal, you see a similar phenomenon where you have hyperactive excitatory neurons and increased sensory sensitivity in these mice,” Feng says.

Reversing hypersensitivity

The results suggest that reestablishing normal levels of neuron activity could reverse this kind of hypersensitivity, Feng says.

“That gives us a cellular target for how in the future we could potentially modulate the inhibitory neuron activity level, which might be beneficial to correct this sensory abnormality,” he says.

Many other studies in mice have linked defects in inhibitory neurons to neurological disorders, including Fragile X syndrome and Rett syndrome, as well as autism.

“Our study is one of several that provide a direct and causative link between inhibitory defects and sensory abnormality, in this model at least,” Feng says. “It provides further evidence to support inhibitory neuron defects as one of the key mechanisms in models of autism spectrum disorders.”

He now plans to study the timing of when these impairments arise during an animal’s development, which could help to guide the development of possible treatments. There are existing drugs that can turn down excitatory neurons, but these drugs have a sedative effect if used throughout the brain, so more targeted treatments could be a better option, Feng says.

“We don’t have a clear target yet, but we have a clear cellular phenomenon to help guide us,” he says. “We are still far away from developing a treatment, but we’re happy that we have identified defects that point in which direction we should go.”

The research was funded by the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT, the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation, the Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research at the McGovern Institute, the Varanasi Family, R. Buxton, and the National Institutes of Health.

Two CRISPR scientists on the future of gene editing

by Sabbi Lall |

As part of our Ask the Brain series, Martin Wienisch and Jonathan Wilde of the Feng lab look into the crystal ball to predict the future of CRISPR tech.

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Where will CRISPR be in five years?

Jonathan: We’ll definitely have more efficient, more precise, and safer editing tools. An immediate impact on human health may be closer than we think through more nutritious and resilient crops. Also, I think we will have more viable tools available for repairing disease-causing mutations in the brain, which is something that the field is really lacking right now.

Martin: And we can use these technologies with new disease models to help us understand brain disorders such as Huntington’s disease.

Jonathan: There are also incredible tools being discovered in nature: exotic CRISPR systems from newly discovered bacteria and viruses. We could use these to attack disease-causing bacteria.

Martin: We would then be using CRISPR systems for the reason they evolved. Also improved gene drives, CRISPR-systems that can wipe out disease-carrying organisms such as mosquitoes, could impact human health in that time frame.

What will move gene therapy forward?

Martin: A breakthrough on delivery. That’s when therapy will exponentially move forward. Therapy will be tailored to different diseases and disorders, depending on relevant cell types or the location of mutations for example.

Jonathan: Also panning biodiversity even faster: we’ve only looked at one small part of the tree of life for tools. Sequencing and computational advances can help: a future where we collect and analyze genomes in the wild using portable sequencers and laptops can only quicken the pace of new discoveries.

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