Molecular Engineering of Natural Light-Gated Chloride Channels for Optogenetic Inhibition

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Targeted modulation of neural activity is an essential approach in basic and clinical neuroscience research. Optogenetic proteins, such as light-activated ion channels or pumps, enable optical control of neuronal activity with exquisite spatiotemporal precision. Thus, they provide powerful means to interrogate how neural activity contributes to brain functions and alter pathological activity to treat neurological disorders. A variety of excitatory optogenetic tools have been developed to meet different needs of activation paradigms. In contrast, inhibitory tools remain underdeveloped. The most well-developed light-driven ion pumps are still not sufficiently effective in silencing neurons due to their intrinsically low photoefficiency and pumping activity. Newly developed light-gated potassium channels also suffer from their small photocurrents and slow current kinetics. Our discovery of natural light-gated chloride channels, Guillardia theta anion channelrhodopsins 1 and 2 (GtACR1 and GtACR2), led to a new class of inhibitory optogenetic tools that are highly sensitive to light, have outstanding anion selectivity, exhibit time constants of milliseconds, and can generate 10–100-fold larger photocurrents in mammalian cells than previous tools. However, we and others discovered that light activation of light-gated chloride channels in mouse neurons depolarizes the axon and presynaptic terminals to trigger neurotransmitter release even though it inhibits action potentials at the soma. This excitatory action is due to the endogenous high concentrations of chloride in the axon and presynaptic terminals, which create a depolarizing chloride efflux upon channel opening. Thus, axonal excitation impedes the goal of neuronal silencing and complicates the interpretation of experiments using light-gated chloride channels. Another important limitation is that the action spectra of light-gated chloride channels are all within the blue to green- light ranges, limiting their effectiveness in deep brain tissues and flexibility in multiplex optogenetic applications. Therefore, the objective of this project is to overcome these two major limitations of light-gated chloride channels. We will harness protein trafficking machinery, structure-based molecular engineering, high- throughput screening, and protein evolution in nature to eliminate the excitatory effect and expand the action spectra range of natural ACRs. We propose to exploit endogenous protein trafficking mechanisms to restrict ACRs within neuronal somatodendritic domain (Aim 1), perform structure-guided high-throughput mutagenesis screens to create ACR variants with robust outward rectification and photocurrents (Aim 2), and identify spectrally shifted ACR variants through natural ACR homolog screens and high-throughput mutagenesis screens (Aim 3). The proposed research capitalizes on a powerful synergistic collaboration of biophysics, protein engineering, high-throughput screening, neuronal physiology, and system neuroscience. The successful completion of this project will present to the neuroscience community a set of much improved inhibitory optogenetic tools with potent efficacy, minimal side effects, and diverse spectral sensitivities.