Research lines 

What are the mechanisms underlying brain development and how developmental processes and early life event influence neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases? These broad questions are the basis of the research that is ongoing in the lab of Neurogenetics at SISSA.  

Brain development is a compless process that involves a broad set of coordinated and strictly controlled events that modulate differenziation, growth, connectivity with the final goal to obtain a properly assembled brain, able to perform complex behaviors. Glia cells, play a central role in establishing and modulating several aspects of nervous system formation and function.  In our lab, we are interested in understanding the events  underlying glia cells specification and maturation and how perturbing these processes affects nervous system development and function.  Moreover, since glia cells are crucial for maintenance and function of the brain, we are also investigating how glia cells are involved in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Our lab take advantage of several powerful in vivo and in vitro techiques to pursue our research questions:

• Drosophila melanogaster: the fruit fly has been used for over a century as a model organism and our lab has a broad expertise in its use to study brain development. We take advantage of the powefull tool-kit of Drosophila and of its ease of genome-editing to study signaling pathway underlying glia differentiation and to introduce mutation found in patients harboring neurodegenerative disorders, to study early life events. In our lab we use multiple techniques, rangin from Immunofluorescence combined with confocal imaging, live imaging, behavior, molecular biology.

• hIPSCs and IPSCs-derived human forebrain organoids: human forebrain organoids, generated from Human induced pluripotent stem cells, represent a promising model to study human brain developmental processes in vitro. Their 3D structure and the possibility to mimic the cellular composition of the forebrain during early developmental stages, allow us to study the genetic and molecular events modulating brain development and, in particular, glia differentiation and establishment

• Cutting edge transcriptomic techniques: in the lab we take advantage of multiple transcriptomic techniques such as Bulk-seq, Single-Cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq), Ribo-Seq, performed on whole tissue or on isolated cellular populations.