Karl Deisseroth

Karl Deisseroth (born November 18, 1971, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.) American psychiatrist and bioengineer best known for his development of methods that revolutionized the study of the brain and led to major advances in neuroscience and biomedical engineering.

Deisseroth earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemical sciences from Harvard University in 1992, and in 1998 he received a doctorate in neuroscience from Stanford University, where he studied calcium signaling in neurons under the guidance of Chinese-born American scientist Richard W. Tsien. Two years later, still at Stanford, Deisseroth completed a medical degree and began a residency in psychiatry. He also continued to investigate mechanisms of neural signaling, working as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of American neuroscientist Robert Malenka from 2001. In 2004 Deisseroth became a principal investigator and clinical educator at Stanford University School of Medicine, where the following year he accepted an assistant professorship in bioengineering and psychiatry. He was made a full professor in 2012.

By the time that Deisseroth joined the Stanford faculty, in 2005, he had made his first major breakthrough, contributing to the development of a new research method known as optogenetics, which combined tools from optics (the study of light) and genetic engineering. Working with American bioengineer Edward S. Boyden and colleagues, he demonstrated through in vitro (“in glass”) experiments that a light-sensitive ion channel known as channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2), which occurs naturally in algae, could act as an optical switch in mammalian neurons. The neurons, genetically engineered to express ChR2 on their surface, could be turned on when exposed to a flash of blue light, enabling very rapid and precise control over neuron activation without compromising cell structure. Within two years Deisseroth and colleagues had successfully applied the technique to the study of neural circuitry in live ChR2-engineered mice. They demonstrated that neurons in the animals’ brains could be stimulated with light flashed through fibre optics positioned over narrowly defined areas of the brain. In subsequent experiments, Deisseroth and his team implanted fibre optics into the brain to control the motor cortex of active rodents and thereby modulate the animals’ behaviour.

Over the next six years, Deisseroth provided extensive characterizations of the tools of optogenetics. He helped elucidate the molecular structure of channelrhodopsin, and he contributed to the discovery of two other functionally distinct rhodopsins, known as halorhodopsin (discovered with Boyden), from the archaeon (primitive microorganism) Natronomonas pharaonis, and Volvox channelrhodopsin, from the alga Volvox carteri. Deisseroth also applied optogenetics to animal models to gain insight into the nature and function of specific neural circuits, such as those responsible for motivation and reward-seeking behaviours and others involved in the loss of voluntary movement in parkinsonism.

In 2013 Deisseroth and his team described their next major development, CLARITY, a method born from the need to overcome the opacity of lipids in brain tissue, which caused light to scatter during microscopic visualization of neurons and thereby obscured image quality. CLARITY employed a special hydrogel (a water-based gel) that in the presence of formaldehyde formed crosslinks with brain tissue and became covalently bound to proteins, nucleic acids, and small biomolecules but not to lipids. When the hydrogel-tissue was treated with a detergent of ionic micelles (loose aggregates of charged molecules) and exposed to an electric field inside an electrophoretic chamber, the negatively charged micelles migrated through the sample, captured the unbound lipids, and drew them out toward the positive electrode. The remaining fine neuronal architecture of the brain was essentially rendered transparent. When treated with fluorescent antibodies targeted to neuronal proteins, however, the neurons could be visualized with remarkable definition by using existing microscopy techniques.

The methods that Deisseroth helped create were rapidly taken up by other researchers, many of whom he later collaborated with. He received numerous awards for his achievements and was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Early Career Scientist (2009). He was elected to the Institute of Medicine (2010) and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2012).