The annual reunion of Baltimore Neuroscientists, the Greater Baltimore Society for Neuroscience (GBSfN) meeting, took place this year in Westminster Hall (the famous resting place of Edgar Allan Poe) on the University of Maryland campus in downtown Baltimore, and the lab was front and center! Alex served as GBSfN President this year, and all lab members pitched in with logistics and science to make this an awesome day for Baltimore Neuro!

Over 170 members (from undergrads to Institute Directors) across our 9 academic institutions, with representatives from government and industry partners came together to celebrate Baltimore Neuroscience. We honored Baltimore icons like Vernon Mountcastle, Sol Snyder, and Linda Richards; discussed the evolving neuroscience technology toolkit with guest speaker George Church; and topped it all off with food, drinks, posters, and neuro-nerd bar trivia. What a day! Thank you to all that made it possible…

Congrats to Bek Altas and other lab members, as well as our collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences and the University of Turin. Our paper on the synaptic localization of Neuroligin-3 in the mouse and human brain and the molecular mechanism that regulates it, became the cover article on this month’s issue of Biological Psychiatry! Congrats to Cheryl Brandenburg for the cover art and the epic experiment that inspired it, one of the first ever immunolabelings of excitatory and inhibitory synapses in the human brain!

Colin Robertson becomes the 3rd member of the lab to defend their PhD, in the historic Davidge Hall, the longest serving Medical Lecture Hall in America!

Colin defended his pioneering work in using Prime Editing, a reverse-transcriptase hybrid CRISPR technology, in the developing mouse brain to model individual patients with genetic epilepsies. Colin is staying on as a postdoc to translate these CRISPR technologies into clinical applications.

Congratulations Colin!!

Just out, our paper on the biology of a synaptic adhesion molecule critically implicated in autism, published in Biological Psychiatry!

This massive paper includes outstanding work from scientists and collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Germany, and the University of Turin in Italy. It includes some of the first ever imaging of human synapses (spot the cool cup-shaped presynaptic terminals nestled in the human brainstem ????!), and identifies a molecular mechanism that determines the synaptic localization and transmitter-specificity of Neuroligin-3 between excitatory and inhibitory synapses in the brain. Congrats to everyone involved, a great way to end the year!

Region-Specific Phosphorylation Determines Neuroligin-3 Localization to Excitatory versus Inhibitory Synapses

Modeling an ultra-rare epilepsy variant in wildtype mice with in utero prime editing

For all genome editing fans out there, check out our latest study on bioRxiv showcasing in utero prime editing to model an epilepsy patient with an ultra-rare GRIN variant. To our knowledge, this marks a significant milestone as the first prime editing of neurons in vivo!

Led by Colin Robertson in our lab, alongside Patrick Davis from Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, this ambitious project aims to make precision medicine more accessible to a broad patient population. This rapid workflow to generate personalized animal models with prime editing we hope is a step toward enabling individuals with rare genetic epilepsies to test and tailor pharmacotherapy on their personalized models, reducing the burdens of exploring treatments.

A big thank you for the collaborative efforts of the team, including our partner UM-MIND labs of Peter Crino, Phil Iffland, Steffen Wolff, Brian Mathur, and Ivy Dick; as well as our wonderful collaborators from U Pitt, Eldin Jašarević, and UC Anschutz, Tracy Bale! Thank you all for this achievement and the fantastic collaboration we enjoy!

We look forward to this research advancing toward bedside-to-bench applications!

Calling all Neuroscientists!!!

Come check out all the PouLab posters at SfN 2023

Sunday pm session: “Genetic Techniques to Target and/or Manipulate Cells”, three back-to-back posters :

• VV22: Find out what the best tag is for labeling your protein by Knockin at Andrea Romanowski‘s poster
  https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10892/presentation/39783
• VV23: Learn about how some genes are resistant to CRISPR-activation at Ashley Marquardt‘s poster
  https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10892/presentation/39785
• VV24: Get to see Neuroligin 3 for the first time in the human brain and how it might be used against brain cancer at Ro Whitten‘s poster
  https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10892/presentation/39784

Monday am session “Animal Models of Epilepsy: Genetics and Pharmacology”:

• C57: Learn about an exciting new way to model individual epilepsy patients in mice using prime editing from Colin Robertson‘s poster
  https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10892/presentation/32416

Wednesday pm session “Mechanisms Underlying Axon Growth and Targeting”:

• B14: Hear about a strange non-coding RNA that is involved in axon growth and potentially regeneration at Garrett Crutcher‘s poster
  https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10892/presentation/33556

Celebrate neuroscience with us!!!