Eric Schreiter

Eric received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Truman State University in Missouri. During his Ph.D. work in Biological Chemistry with Catherine L. Drennan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he worked on the molecular mechanism of nickel ion homeostasis in bacteria by solving x-ray crystal structures of the nickel-responsive transcription factor NikR. His postdoctoral work was with Richard T. Lee at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston studying metabolic signaling. He then had a faculty appointment at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, where he worked on the molecular aspects of protein S-nitrosylation signaling. Eric came to Janelia as a Senior Scientist in order to prototype new protein-based tools for neurobiology.

Dr. Schreiter will be leading a discussion on Chemigenetic Indicators of Neuronal Activity. Understanding how neural circuits mediate behavior requires high-speed recording from ensembles of neurons for long periods of time. He and his team have engineered a fluorescent voltage indicator, called Voltron, that combines a genetically-targetable protein sensor with bright and photostable synthetic dyes. The increased photon output relative to fluorescent protein-based indicators allowed them to image voltage from significantly larger fields of view containing more neurons and over longer periods of time. For example, Voltron allowed single-trial recording of spikes and subthreshold voltage signals from dozens of neurons simultaneously over more than 15-minutes of continuous imaging in vivo in mouse cortex. They also show demonstrations in adult fruit flies and behaving zebrafish. He’ll describe unpublished efforts to improve Voltron and explore other chemigenetic approaches to neural activity indicators.