Mukherjee Lab
Principal Investigator: Arnab Mukherjee
Institution: University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Many leading questions in neuroscience such as how neurons encode experience, modify behavior, and degenerate, require neural activity to be monitored throughout the brain in living animals. Neuronal activity is tightly linked to an increase in intracellular calcium. Therefore, a cornerstone technology for monitoring neural activity involves the use of genetically encoded fluorescent reporters of intracellular calcium. While fluorescent tools for calcium sensing have proven immensely transformative for neuroscience research, optical approaches do not allow neural activity to be monitored with brain-wide coverage or at any arbitrary depth. To address this challenge, we will develop a new type of genetic sensor for visualizing cumulative calcium signals at a brain- wide scale using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). To construct these sensors, we will leverage water channels known as aquaporins. We will build on our earlier discovery that aquaporins can be used to generate diffusion-weighted MRI contrast by increasing the rate of water exchange across the cell membrane. Unlike conventional MRI reporters, aquaporin-based contrast does not involve the use of metals, thereby permitting f…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01NS128278-04: Metal-free, genetically encoded reporters for calcium recording with MRI (2026)
- 5R01NS128278-03: Metal-free, genetically encoded reporters for calcium recording with MRI (2025)
- 5R01NS128278-02: Metal-free, genetically encoded reporters for calcium recording with MRI (2024)
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