The Scientist Who Records The Computations Of Cells | Adam Cohen

What if we could record several molecular events happening inside cells along time?

Today I have the pleasure to discuss an outstanding tool to record molecular events in time with Professor Adam Cohen. Adam is a Professor of Chemistry, Chemical Biology, and Physics at Harvard, he has countless academic and extra-academic achievements that led to his MIT Technology Review nomination to the 35 world's top innovators under 35 in 2007. 

Adam and I chat about Adam’s story as an interdisciplinary scientist, dating back to high school, when he replicated a scanning tunneling microscope by himself. We discuss the tool that his lab has recently developed, a protein structure that grows over time inside single cells resulting in a cell metronome that can be coupled with colored markers responsive to cellular events to record their position over time. We discuss how Adam, his postdoc first author, and his lab took inspiration to build such a tool from the annual growth of trees. We then compare protein-based versus nucleic acid-based recorders of cellular events, and their relative limitations and promises. We discuss technical questions such as how to control not to perturb cells, time resolution, and multiplexing possibilities. Finally, we reason on the futuristic applications in vivo to monitor the molecular events of the mouse brain at the level of single cells along time for extended periods of time. So looking forward to seeing what Adam and the Cohen lab achieve in the next few years!

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RESOURCES

Adam’s lab at Harvard: http://cohenweb.rc.fas.harvard.edu/

[ACADEMIC] Time-tagged ticker tapes for intracellular recordings: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01524-7

Q-State Biosciences: https://www.qstatebio.com/