(bright music)
- Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to our live view.
I hope that you managed
to catch some cool posters at the poster session.
I managed to get a couple under my belt.
And welcome back for the next segment of our program,
which is the presentation of the 2020 Sammy Kuo Awards
for best papers from our graduate students
and our postdocs over the past 12 months.
And to present the awards
is professor Corinna Darian-Smith,
who is in the department of Comparative Medicine
and who has been chairing the Kuo's selection committees
for the past six years.
And I am so appreciative to Corinna
for taking on that pleasant responsibility.
Corinna's research focuses on
the neural control of hand movements
and recovery of these pathways after injury.
And without further ado,
I will turn the floor right over
to my partner here, Corinna.
- Thank you, Bill.
So I just want to thank Bill.
It's been a fabulous meeting so far,
and I will be getting underway here just in a second.
So I just want to start this presentation
as I always do by giving a little bit
of background about the award.
Sammy Kuo was born in Taipei in Taiwan in 1984
to parents Yashi and Li-Ling Kuo.
And in 1996, when Sammy was 12 years old,
he was diagnosed with subacute sclerosing panencephalitis,
which is a rare inflammatory disease arising from measles.
His family cared for him at home until he passed away
in 2006 at the age of 22.
After Sammy's death, his cousins,
Peggy and Amy Chen, who were both Stanford graduates,
and I believe they're both in the audience today,
so welcome very much to the presentation,
they contacted the Neurosciences Institute at the time
and led their family to establish
the Sammy Kuo Memorial Scholarship Fund
to support basic research in neuroscience.
This opportunity enabled the family
to memorialize a boy they loved by helping to recognize
crucial neuroscience research
that might one day help cure other children
with similar conditions.
Though born of heartbreak,
this award is anything but heartbreaking,
it's very much a celebration.
And it highlights the importance
of doing basic neuroscience research
that recognizes exceptional papers
in early career scientists.
As I say, it's been going for 13 years.
And the standards of the papers that are submitted
are absolutely extraordinary and I get the great pleasure
of reading many of them.
If you go to the website for the Sammy Kuo,
you'll be able to see all the previous winners
that are listed here.
It's quite star-studded.
So before I get going,
I'd also like to thank the selection committees
for all their hard work.
As I've said, I just get the lovely job
of looking at the highest ranking of the submissions.
They are all of excellent standard.
And I also want to give credit
to those working behind the scenes
to make this all happen, the administrative team.
I also want to apologize before I begin,
in case I mispronounce anybody's names,
I'm not known for my excellent pronunciations.
So we start this year with the graduate students awards.
And an honorable mention goes to Cosmos Yuqi
from Tom Sudhof's lab for his paper in "Neuron."
Cosmos used genetic manipulations of an interacting pair
of trans-synaptic organize molecules to probe the function
of a particular circuit involved
in the formation of olfactory memories.
Importantly, the paper provides a new perspective
on the role of centrifugal projections
from the anterior olfactory nucleus to the olfactory bulb
by defining the molecular basis for a synaptic connection
that is key for establishing, but not maintaining
or recalling a social form of olfactory memory.
The second honorable mention
in the grad component of the award
goes to the Themasap Khan from Sergiu Pasca's lab,
for his paper which came out
in "Nature Medicine" just last week.
Themasap co-lead this extraordinary effort
with a postdoc Omer Revah,
who was also nominated for the postdoctoral award.
This was a mechanistic study
of human cortical neurons derived from patients
carrying the most common human genetic microdeletion
associated with psychiatric disease.
Cortical organoids were derived from stem cells,
reprogrammed from 15 subjects with the deletion syndrome
and 15 subjects who were controls.
Over 400 neurons were patched
and over 5,000 individuals cells were imaged
to demonstrate a robust phenotype across patients,
cell lines, and experiments.
And in a closed series of experiments,
the study provided novel insights
into neuro biological pathways,
underlying the development of mental illness
with this deletion syndrome.
The study represents one of the largest efforts
to date aimed at modeling human brain disease
with stem cells, and these findings support the value
of a major mutational model
for elucidating the biology
of complex neuropsychiatric disorders
and opens a new direction for uncovering therapeutics.
A third place prize, a grad prize finalist this year
is Colleen Rhoades from E.J. Chichilnisky's lab
for her paper in "Neuron."
In this paper Colleen discovered striking
and unusual light response properties
in a newly characterized type of retinal ganglion cell
in the primate retina,
the smooth monostratified cells.
She did a metadata analysis on 15 years
of primate retinal recordings in the lab
to identify a novel cell type,
then focused new experiments on these cells.
She found they had receptive field characteristics,
hotspots to sensitivity,
that looked very different to textbook models
of the ganglion cell receptor fields.
She found that the hotspots
likely represent distinct portions
of the dendritic branches of these cells,
which act as distinct computational units
that may be related to the spatial integration
of inputs onto the dendrites.
This work breaks new ground for our understanding
of retinal processing, and her data analysis approach,
which she used to identify the cells
opens the way for better understanding
of diverse cell types in the primate retina.
Xiang Wu from the Hong lab
is this year's second place finalist for the grad component
of the Sammy Koa Award
for his paper in "PNAS."
Optogenetics, as we know,
has been transformative in neuroscience,
but has certain limitations.
There's limited tissue penetration
of visible light into the deep brain structures,
and it requires invasive surgery
and intercranial implantations.
Xiang contributed to the original design
and development of what is now called sono-optogenetics,
which uses mechanoluminescent nanoparticles
injected intravenously.
After injection in a mouse model,
these nanoparticles can be charged repeatedly
by 400 nanometer light
while passing through the superficial blood vessels
and then gated by focused ultrasound
to release the stored energy locally.
Xiang was able to repeatedly evoke hind limb motion
in the mouse, expressing channel robots into
in motor neurons of the brain
without any surgery or implantation
of optical fiber or LED devices,
which is really quite extraordinary.
The sono-optogenetics method opens up
great opportunities for neuroscience, for example,
for rapid screening of different target regions
in the brain, for optogenetic modulation,
or for any application where a light source is needed
deep in the body,
such as the spinal cord,
peripheral nervous system, and so on.
Since its publication,
this technology has already received great interest,
both inside and outside
of the Stanford neuroscience community.
This year grad student paper of the year
goes to joint co-first authors, Jiefu Li
and Shuo Han from the Luo and Ting labs
for their paper in "Cell."
This interdisciplinary study used institute
cell-surface proteomic profiling
of developing immature olfactory projection neurons
to show how the neuronal surface landscape
develops over time.
They designed a series of experiments
in intact dissected fly brains
to capture cell-surface proteomes
of projection neurons for mass spectrometry analysis.
And they apparently led dissection parties
to dissect these brains, about 9,000 fly brains.
Those were some gatherings.
From this analysis,
they identified about 700 cell-surface proteins
in the pupil and adult proteomes.
They found that most synaptic transmission proteins
were enriched in the adult sample,
whereas the pupil cell-surface proteome
contained many known molecules.
Importantly, the pupil enriched list contain proteins
with no previously known function in brain wiring.
They tested the top 20 of these unknown proteins
to disrupt their function
and found that all 20 of them gave wiring defects,
which is fairly extraordinary.
This work suggests that our knowledge of wiring molecules
from flies to mammals is far from complete,
and it reveals many new neuro wiring molecules,
belonging to evolutionarily conserved,
but previously unexpected molecular families
and opens many new avenues of research.
So we now turn to the postdoctoral awardees
and an honorable mention this year
goes to Omer Revah, from the Pasca lab.
And for those of you with intact short term memories,
we've actually just shown this paper previously.
Omer was co-lead on the same paper,
as Themasap Khan who received the honorable mention
in the grad category.
As I mentioned with Themasap,
this study represents one of the largest efforts to date
aimed at modeling human brain disease,
and, in this case, psychiatric disease with stem cells.
The work also shows what can be achieved
with true interdisciplinary collaboration.
In this case, Themasap brought stem cell expertise
and Omer brought electrophysiology
and disease pathogenesis expertise to the table.
And together they uncovered the molecular
and cellular phenotypes associated with the genetic form
of neuropsychiatric disease.
Third place this year was a tie
between Sergey Stavinsky and Elenor Cole,
and we will start with Sergey.
Sergey's from the Henderson lab,
and he was first author on this beautiful study
published in "eLife,"
which demonstrated that the so-called knob area,
hand knob area rather, of the human motor cortex,
which is long associated with upper limb movements
also contains representation
for speech articulator movements.
Using electrodes implanted chronically in the brains
of research participants with paralysis,
Sergey identified the neurodynamics
present in motor cortex during speech,
and used these insights to decode
a selection of spoken syllables and words
with an accuracy of about 85%.
This is a major advance in understanding
both the organization of human motor cortex
and the mechanisms by which speech is generated,
and it suggests new directions for restoring function
to people who struggle with communication difficulties.
Elenor Cole from the Williams lab
ties to third place this year
for her study published
in the "American Journal of Psychiatry."
It introduces a novel
and effective non-invasive brain stimulation treatment
for medication resistant depression.
Called SAINT, it uses functional connectivity
magnetic resonance imaging guided targeting,
which is able to select the optimal target region
of the brain for each individual patient.
She and colleagues were able to show
that in just five days, SAINT induced remission
in 90% of participants,
which is almost double what is currently reported
with standard treatments for this
for treatment resistant depression.
This technique could revolutionize
the treatment of depression.
Importantly, it induces remission more rapidly
than existing treatments,
and it provides a treatment
without the systemic side effects
associated with many existing options.
The short duration of the treatment
means that SAINT could also have an application
in emergency rooms or during acute hospitalizations
to rapidly ensure the safety of suicidal patients.
This year's second place goes to Frank Willett
from the Neuroprosthetics Translational Lab,
co-directed by Jamie Henderson and Krishna Shenoy,
for his co first author paper published in "Cell."
This study used microelectrode recording arrays
to revisit motor somatotopy
in two subjects with tetraplegia
as they made or tried to make various movements
of the face, leg, and arms.
What they found, surprisingly,
was that the so-called hand knob area of the premotor cortex
in people with tetraplegia is tuned,
not just to one region of the body,
but to the entire body.
And this contradicts traditional views
of human motor cortical organization.
They describe what seems to be a compositional code
that links all four limbs together,
potentially facilitating skill transfer.
This is especially exciting,
because with whole body tuning, it then becomes possible
for a discrete brain computer interface
to accurately decode all four limbs.
This work and paper are likely
to help the field entirely rethink
how the motor cortex is organized overall.
First place this year goes to Sayaka Inoue
from the Shah lab
for her paper in "Cell."
Behavior, as we know, is inextricably linked
to internal states, but little is understood
of the mechanisms that govern this link.
It is a beautiful study, Sayaka showed in mice
that estrogen acts on a genetically specified set
of hypothalamic neurons
to rewire the connectivity dynamically
across the ovulatory cycle.
She showed that the rise of estrogen,
that controls ovulation,
also induces a three fold structural increase
in the connectivity of a specific projection to its target,
but this increase is electrophysiologically meaningful,
and that inhibiting these connections
does away completely with female sexual behavior.
Their discovery of large-scale dynamic rewiring
of connections in the adult brain is paradigm shifting
as it raises the exciting possibility
that the adult brain may rewire
and equally dramatically
in other physiologically relevant states.
So, at this point in a normal year,
we would have everybody up
next to the podium, so that they could look awkward
and everyone can look at them,
and check them out, but it's not an ordinary year,
so they get away with having just their mugshots here.
And I just like to congratulate everybody again
for their fabulous efforts.
It's always very exciting to read the papers,
and we will be watching you all
going forward in your very exciting careers.
So congratulations again. (claps)