Cytochrome c Oxidase: A Treasure Trove in Revealing Neuronal Properties from Systems to Molecules

Margaret Wong-Riley received her BS (1965) and MA (1966) in Science Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, NY and her PhD (1970) in Anatomy/Neuroanatomy from Stanford University, CA. Her postdoctoral research was at the U. of Wisconsin, Madison and at NIH. In 1973, she became an Assi’t and later an Assoc. Professor with tenure at UC San Francisco. For family reasons, shemoved to the Medical College of Wisconsin, where she assumed Associate Professorship (1981) followed by full Professorship (1984) until her retirement in 2019. She taught neuroscience to medical and graduate students, and her neuroscience research was funded continuously by NIH for 40 years. Her main focus was the cellular and molecular mechanisms of energy regulation in neurons. She found that cytochrome c oxidase, a mitochondrial enzyme essential for life, is a sensitive and reliable indicator of neuronal activity. The technique that her lab developed has been widely used, and new regions were uncovered in the primate visual cortex. Her lab systematically probed the molecular mechanisms of bigenomic regulation of this enzyme and how it is tightly coupled to the regulation of neurotransmitter receptor genes in neurons. They also found that cytochrome c oxidase plays a critical role in photobiomodulationthat rescued the metabolic integrity of neurons exposed to various toxins. Another major revelation pertains to the critical period of postnatal development in both the respiratory system and the primary visual cortex. An abrupt and significant fall in cytochrome oxidase level during this time was correlated with unexpected changes in neurotransmitter receptor expressions and electrophysiological properties of neurons. Thus far, she has published 167 research articles, 15 book chapters, and edited a book, “Neuroscience Secrets” (2000, Hanley & Belfus; translated also into Spanish and Portuguese). She served on many NIH review panels and Study Sections as well as a number of editorial boards. She became the Founding Editor-in-chief of Eye and Brain in 2010. In 1996, she was honored with the Roy and Sherrington Award given by the Gordon Research Conference at Oxford