Gero Miesenböck

Biosketch

Gero Miesenböck is Waynflete Professor of Physiology and founding Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at the University of Oxford. He completed a medical degree at the University of Innsbruck in his native Austria and was a postdoctoral fellow at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Before coming to Oxford in 2007, he held faculty positions at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Yale University.

Research Interests

Miesenböck’s career as a principal investigator has unfolded in two acts. During the first act, from 1999 until approximately 2011, he established the conceptual and experimental foundations of optogenetics. He was the first to use retinal-containing opsins to activate normally light-insensitive neurons and the first to use optogenetics to control animal behavior. The proof-of-principle stage was followed by influential work on the expression of sex-specific behaviors and the neural basis of reinforcement.

The second act, from 2011 until the present, has largely been devoted to understanding the regulation and function of sleep. Miesenböck discovered that sleep-inducing neurons estimate sleep need by monitoring the flow of electrons through their own mitochondria. Sleep loss creates an imbalance between electron supply and ATP demand that diverts electrons from the respiratory chain into side reactions with molecular oxygen, producing reactive oxygen species which fragment polyunsaturated membrane lipids. Sleep-control neurons count the release of lipid peroxidation products (and transduce this signal into sleep) with the help of a redox-sensitive potassium channel. This work has furnished a molecular interpretation of sleep pressure, uncovered the cellular processes responsible for its accumulation and discharge, and identified aerobic metabolism as a fundamental cause of sleep.