Date: 7 January 2026 (Wednesday)
Time: 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Venue: Seminar Room 2, G/F, Laboratory Block, 21 Sassoon Road 
Host: Professor Tao Ni

Dr. Changlu Tao is an associate investigator at the Hefei National Research Center for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He earned his Ph.D. from USTC in 2017. He then served as a postdoctoral fellow at the same institutes from 2017 to 2020. In 2020, he joined the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, as an associate investigator. In April 2025, he returned to USTC. His research focuses on advancing and integrating cryo-ET with optical approaches to investigate the structure and function of neuronal synapses. His work has advanced our understanding of molecular assembly within synapses and the biophysical mechanisms underlying synaptic transmission. His studies have been mainly published in Science, Nature Neuroscience and The Journal of Neuroscience.

Synapses are the fundamental units that connect neural circuits and perform information processing in the brain. The advent of cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) has enabled 3D imaging of intact cellular specimen at molecular resolution, offering a breakthrough opportunity to illuminate the long-standing “black box” of synaptic architecture. In this talk, I will present our efforts on studying the ultrastructures of intact hippocampal synapses with cryo-ET and correlative approaches. We resolved the in-situ structure of GABAA receptors in inhibitory synapses, revealing their organizational principle of mesophasic phase separation. More recently, by developing millisecond-precision time-resolved cryo-ET, we resolved the dynamic process of vesicle release during neurotransmission. This led to the discovery of a previously unknown biophysical mechanism, the “kiss–shrink–run/collapse” model, which addresses a decades-long debate and elucidates the structural basis for high-efficiency and high-fidelity transmission of neural information.