Ed Boyden

Wonderful to collaborate with, and to support as an advisor, E11 Bio - and to announce PRISM, a technology for mapping brains in a self-correcting way, by barcoding neurons followed by expansion microscopy! Thread below by E11 Bio CEO Andrew Payne, with preprint at, www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Kicking off #GEF25, the Morning Presidential Lecture features @eboyden3.bsky.social on the origins and mission of the event, who calls it 'the first conference of its kind'.

The Tiling Tree Method How to think of every way of solving a problem

What if you could think of every possible solution to a problem? Then you might be able to simply pick the best one - even if it was highly nonobvious. With the “tiling tree” method, you can learn, and practice, the skill of doing just that: engineeringx.substack.com/p/the-tiling...

Just posted, by Nina Khera, @clairebookworm.bsky.social, and myself: “Involuntary collaboration: a strategy for decentralized science”! Discussing the "invent-deploy-discover-design" model, and why the Bell Labs of the 21st century might be the whole earth. engineeringx.substack.com/p/involuntar...

Former MIT researchers advance a new model for innovation Developed by former MIT researchers, focused research organizations (FROs) undertake large research efforts and have begun to contribute to scientific advances.

- @ZachinBoston, for @mit.edu News, on the story of Convergent Research and our FROs

feat. @eboyden3.bsky.social, @adammarblestone.bsky.social, @andrewcpayne.bsky.social, @sgrodriques.bsky.social, Tom Kalil, @anastasiag.bsky.social...

news.mit.edu/2025/former-...

Former MIT researchers advance a new model for innovation Developed by former MIT researchers, focused research organizations (FROs) undertake large research efforts and have begun to contribute to scientific advances.

MIT News reports on focused research organizations (FROs), non-profit startups, developed by some of our group members and alumni. FROs can work on problems that are a poor fit for academia or the for-profit startup world. news.mit.edu/2025/former-...

Down to my last few post-it notes, that my group members made for me in 2014, after I got tenure at MIT. Each post-it note contains something that I said often enough, that my group members thought it would save me time, to simply hand out a post-it note, whenever the wisdom was needed :)

Engineering Serendipity Three Short Stories About How to Increase Luck Through Skill

Just posted, “Engineering Serendipity,” a lightly edited (to accommodate the transition from spoken to written form) version of the commencement speech I gave at my high school, the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science, May 8, 2025: engineeringx.substack.com/p/engineerin...

Just published, expansion in situ genome sequencing, where you can sequence DNA while still inside the cell, mapping its organization relative to proteins and other markers, with the help of expansion microscopy! Led by @jbuenrostro.bksy.social. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

US researchers must stand up to protect freedoms, not just funding Curtailment of freedoms and disregard for the rule of law in the United States is destroying the ability of science to serve the nation’s, and the world’s, interests. Researchers can take action.

New op-ed in @nature.com: The Trump administration's assault on freedoms and the rule of law is an existential threat to US science. We urge scientists to speak out in defense of freedoms, not just funding. With Andrea Liu @upenn.edu and Sidney Nagel of UChicago! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"In Down syndrome mice, 40Hz light and sound improve cognition, neurogenesis, connectivity." MIT News: news.mit.edu/2025/in-down... Paper: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

TIME100 Philanthropy: K. Lisa Yang Find out why K. Lisa Yang is on the TIME100 Most Influential People in Philanthropy 2025 list.

Congrats to Lisa Yang - who founded so many visionary centers at MIT, and other places, to do daring and creative research with huge amounts of real-world impact - for being named to the TIME 100 Philanthropy list, for 2025! Grateful to be part of the Yang Tan Collective. time.com/collections/...

The Dropout Curriculum How do you plan what to learn, to solve the problems you care about?

New blog at "Engineering {X}," where X = serendipity, understanding, or existence! @clairebookworm.bsky.social, Nina Khera, and I are co-editors. Our first post, "The Dropout Curriculum," asks: what should you learn, to disrupt fields from the outside? engineeringx.substack.com/p/the-dropou...

Honored to give the 2025 commencement speech for my amazing high school, the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (TAMS) at the University of North Texas (students skip years of high school, and go straight to college). My topic - how to engineer serendipity: www.youtube.com/live/nVknJwk...

Join me May 20 @ 11 AM ET for a webinar with Bio-protocol!

I'll walk through our single-shot 20-fold expansion microscopy (20ExM) method + share the full protocol so you can try it too.

YouTube video by Protocol Labs Technologies for Stimulating and Simulating the Brain | Ed Boyden

📹 Revisit the discussion on the intricate complexity of brain circuitry with @eboyden3.bsky.social, renowned MIT professor and director of the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, as he seeks to understand human existence.

The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack One of the simplest, most over-studied organisms in the world is the C. elegans nematode. For 13 years, a project called OpenWorm has tried—and utterly failed—to simulate it.

Fun with worms on @WIRED
www.wired.com/story/openwo...
We've been thinking about how #celegans can revolutionize science again, together with @kordinglab.bsky.social @eboyden3.bsky.social @wormsense.bsky.social and many other (also find our preprint on #arXiv)

YouTube video by Protocol Labs What if we could understand the meaning of life?

MIT’s Ed Boyden is pioneering methods like expansion microscopy to create detailed 3D maps of neural structures, enhancing our understanding of the brain's networks to maybe even fathom life's meaning. 🧠

Expansion microscopy (ExM) of the entire mouse body (pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...), developed by the labs of Profs. Jae-Byum Chang and Young-Gyu Yoon (former SynthNeuro postdocs running labs at KAIST), could empower studies of how multiple systems (nervous, immune, etc.) interact across scales.

The MIT McGovern Institute’s story celebrating the 10th birthday of expansion microscopy (ExM). One highlight: ExM is not only easy to do, it’s easy to modify - so lots of people are altering and applying ExM for custom purposes, leading to unexpected innovations: mcgovern.mit.edu/2025/03/03/t...

A subcellular map of translational machinery composition and regulation at the single-molecule level Millions of ribosomes are packed within mammalian cells, yet we lack tools to visualize them in toto and characterize their subcellular composition. In this study, we present ribosome expansion micros...

Exciting new work from Barna Lab @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

ExPOSE: a comprehensive toolkit to perform expansion microscopy in plant protoplast systems This method provides a robust approach for performing expansion microscopy in plant protoplasts for imaging single-cell and subcellular compartments at greatly enhanced resolution.

Some of my postdoc work has been "exposed" today in @theplantjournal.bsky.social! 😁🎉🔬 We developed ExPOSE - a method to perform expansion microscopy in plant protoplast systems. Here's a quick🧵of the details: @meter76.bsky.social @lily-oconnor.bsky.social
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Genetically-encoded markers for confocal visualization of single dense core vesicles - Communications Biology Genetically encoded dense core vesicle markers, compatible with immunohistochemistry and expansion microscopy, enable single-vesicle resolution in Drosophila using confocal microscopy.

Genetically encoded dense core vesicle markers, compatible with immunohistochemistry and expansion microscopy, enable single-vesicle resolution in Drosophila using confocal microscopy.

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Published in final form, Feb 12, 2025: Shin et al., "Dense, continuous membrane labeling and expansion microscopy visualization of ultrastructure in tissues." Journal link: www.nature.com/articles/s41... PDF link: synthneuro.org/publications... News story: mcgovern.mit.edu/2025/02/18/s...

IN BRIEF: Super-califragilisticexpialidocious-resolution microscopy: How expansion microscopy can be applied to plants (Sonhita Chakraborty) https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koaf002 #PlantScience

Highly multiplexed spatial transcriptomics in bacteria Single-cell decisions made in complex environments underlie many bacterial phenomena. Image-based transcriptomics approaches offer an avenue to study such behaviors, yet these approaches have been hin...

Bacterial-MERFISH combines 1000-fold volumetric expansion with multiplexed fluorescence in situ hybridization, enabling high-throughput, spatially resolved profiling of thousands of operons within individual bacteria. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #NBThighlight

Leading in STEM used to be such a point of pride in American patriotism. We were proud to be the first on the moon, to the atom bomb. When did that change? We want cures for diseases like AIDS, obesity, cancer, Alzheimer's and we want to get there first. Why can't we tap into that?

A thought today: in many neuroengineering projects - and perhaps in life in general - sometimes, success is what you don't do.

GEF25-Homepage - rizzoli-lab Program Location & Travel About Home GEF25, organized in the 10th anniversary year of ExM, focuses on cutting-edge advancements in expansion microscopy, as a part of global initiatives to democratize ...

The website to the biggest yet, 10th anniversary, Expansion Microscopy meeting in Göttingen is online. Come all! rizzoli-lab.de/gef25/ @alishaib.bsky.social