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.

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 thresholdBrain, 2022

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

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…

Moving Day

Moving day is here! Time for the Poulopoulos Lab to get a new home across the street in Health Sciences Facility III.

Equipment needs bubble wrap, heavy things need lifting, scopes come apart and back together again. And in the midst of this madness, our science doesn’t miss a beat! The heroic investigators of the lab continued cloning and perfusing in between filling crates and hauling off incubators. Everyone working hard… except the guy behind the camera, that is.

 

Goodbye old lab… hello vista from the 9th floor of the new and improved PouLab!!!