Tag: Andrea

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PouLab posters at SfN 2023

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 :

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

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

Celebrate neuroscience with us!!!

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Cas9-RC on the cover of The CRISPR Journal!

Ryan Richardson’s paper describing the development of Cas9-RC, a new CRISPR agent with increased performance for knockin, is out in the October 2023 issue of The CRISPR Journal.

Not only that, but the paper got the cover! Kudos to Cheryl Brandenburg for the beautiful image of knockin neurons and astrocytes using Cas9-RC in the developing mouse brain. Congrats to the whole team for concluding this large piece of Synth Bio meets Dev Neurosci!

We would be delighted to have you try out Cas9-RC for your own knockin needs. Plasmids will become available on Addgene within the next few days!

Cas9-RC Knockin on the cover of The CRISPR Journal
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PouLab at SfN 2022

Follow our science at the 4 PouLab posters at SfN 2022 in San Diego!

Cheryl Brandenburg on Monday morning (Y5):
“Light sheet mapping of parvalbumin subtypes of Purkinje cells using in vivo CRISPR strategies“

Colin Robertson on Monday afternoon (YY36):
“Neural somatic genome editing in the brain for personalized patient models“

Garrett Bunce and Ro Whitten on Wednesday morning (B31):
“The novel gene Ganon-1 produces a scaffolding RNA for growth signaling in developing axon projections“

Andrea Romanowski on Wednesday morning (C45):
“Mosaic Cas9 fusions to investigate cortical wiring by IgLON schizophrenia risk-genes in the rodent brain”


See you all at #SFN2022

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Phosphorylation of Neuroligin-3

Our work on how the synaptic adhesion molecule Neuroligin-3 is targeted to either excitatory or inhibitory synapses based on phosphorylation is now available on the bioRxiv! Congrats to Bekir Altas, Liam Tuffy, Annarita Patrizi and the rest of the team in this international collaboration between the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, and the University of Turin.

Phosphorylation Determines Whether Neuroligin-3 is at Excitatory or Inhibitory Synapses in Different Regions of the Brain

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All in a day’s work…

Garrett hosts NOVA’s Halal on the Lawn, then gives a talk on the lncRNA he discovered; Andrea does supply runs, then gives a talk on multiplexing schizophrenia risk genes with CRISPR; Elise handles donation logistics, and attends both talks! And at the end of a good day’s work, the lab celebrates Alex’s birthday.

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Never heard of “mTOR outposts”? Now you have!

Read all about our postulate of the curious little things called “mTOR outposts” in this Hypothesis & Theory paper just out in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience!

Neuronal mTOR Outposts: Implications for Translation, Signaling, and Plasticity

Happy day for Bek, Andrea, Garrett, and Alex. Appreciations to Helen Bateup and Akira Yoshii for very constructive reviewing; to Gerardo Morfini for editing the Kinase/phosphatase signaling and axonal function in health and disease topic; and to all in the acknowledgements for the fascinating discussions around the concepts in the mTOR outpost model. Be part of those discussions, send us your thoughts!

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PouLab posters get prizes at the 2022 PiN Retreat!

Two-out-of-two for the lab’s posters at this year’s Program in Neuroscience retreat! Colin Robertson got the “Most innovative experimental design” prize for his poster on “In Vivo Prime Editor Introduces Patient Epilepsy Mutation in the Rodent Brain to Recapitulate Seizures” and Andrea Romanowski accepted a crown and scepter for the “Rule a kingdom” prize for her poster on “Multiplexed manipulation of gene dosage of schizophrenia risk genes using Cas9 fusions changes layer position of cortical neurons”. Congrats PouLab grad students!!!

Andrea, Ashley (McCarthy Lab), Garrett, and Colin accepting their prizes at the 2022 PiN retreat.
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How an mTOR pathway gene causes epilepsy in a pedigree dating from 1727

Congratulations to Philip Iffland and the Peter Crino Lab –with help from PouLab grad student Andrea Romanowski among the collaborator team– for the publication of a massive piece of work just out in Brain, spanning the fields of human genetics, cell biology, genome editing, electrophysiology, and brain development to identify the gene (NPRL3) and mechanisms that cause epilepsy in affected patients.

“NPRL3 loss alters neuronal morphology, mTOR localization, cortical lamination, and seizure threshold” Brain, 2022

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Congrats to Ryan and co. for “Cas9 fusions for precision in vivo editing” out on the bioRxiv!

The lab’s first pub is a nifty piece of synth bio for genome editing the brain. Richardson et al. describe a platform to test and develop new high-precision genome editing reagents. Some of our new CRISPR fusions, like eRad18-Cas9-CtIP with linear donors, showed up to 45-times higher accuracy at point-mutation editing compared to vanilla CRISPR. Another step toward direct in vivo knockin and in situ gene therapy approaches!

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.15.199620v1

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The Lab goes to Chicago…

(photo by T. Soykan)

The lab has fun recreating Raphael’s “The School of Athens” in Chicago, while presenting at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience!

Ryan, Marilyn, and Jeffrey unveiled their new approach to high efficiency in vivo genome engineering with in situ CRISPR:
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/7883/presentation/65807

Bek, Andrea, Noury, and Uriel debuted their findings on how a mutation in a family with intellectual disability affects the dynactin complex and cortical circuit wiring:
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/7883/presentation/66733

Alex presented new findings on how phosphorylation of Neuroligin adhesion molecules determines synapse specificities:
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/7883/presentation/58703

And how reciprocal adhesion gradient matching guides the development of cortical circuitry:
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/7883/presentation/63936

… and Garrett stashed us some sweet top-shelf probes…