Dr. Nathan Shaner’s research program aims to understand the fundamental mechanisms at work in the two-way interaction of light with biological systems at the level of proteins, cells, and organisms. With this understanding, his lab can exploit the basic principles of biological fluorescence, bioluminescence, and photoreception to create widely useful genetically encodable probes for observing and manipulating cell activity and function. He has been engineering genetically encoded optical probes for over 20 years. Many of the “mFruit” family of monomeric DsRed variants were developed by him as a PhD. Student (e.g., mCherry, tdTomato and mApple), as well as more recently developed probes (e.g., mNeonGreen), which have proven to be invaluable across a broad array of biological research fields and remain in common use. In the past decade, the research of Shaner’s group has expanded to include transcriptomics-based bioprospecting, inspired by his postdoctoral work at MBARI, enabling discovery of a large family of FPs from Aequorea jelly species that had previously gone unnoticed. Other current works focus on synthesizing optogenetics, fluorescence and bioluminescence to create non-invasive tools for reporting and modulating neural activity. Among his newest advances is a high-contrast bioluminescent Ca2+ indicator that enables fast single-cell recording in neurons, the first in a new frontier of probes that will greatly expand accessibility to non-invasive imaging.

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