“We started thinking: ‘What if we could light up the brain from the inside?'” said Christopher Moore, a professor of brain science at Brown University. “Shining light on the brain is used to measure activity—usually through a process called fluorescence—or to drive activity in cells to test what role they play. But shooting lasers at the brain has downsides when it comes to experiments, often requiring fancy hardware and a lower rate of success. We figured we could use bioluminescence instead.”

The Bioluminescence Hub at Brown’s Carney Institute for Brain Science launched in 2017 based on collaborations between Moore (associate director of the Carney Institute), Diane Lipscombe (the institute’s director), Ute Hochgeschwender (at Central Michigan University) and Nathan Shaner (at the University of California San Diego).