Tag: Noury

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Neuroligin-3 paper gets the cover of Biological Psychiatry!

Biol Psychiatry cover, Nov 2024

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!

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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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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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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…

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Lab welcomes three new STARs!!!

We are very excited to welcome the newest PouLab members, three talented postbac scholars from UMB’s prestigious STAR-PREP program will become the lab’s youngest investigators! Jefferey Inen, mouse geneticist & cancer biologist extraordinaire from UMBC, will work with Ryan Richardson; Saovleak “Noury” Khim, all-round development-to-regenerative neuroscientist from Temple, and Uriel Jean-Baptiste, hardcore structure-function biochemist from Florida State, will work with Bek Altas. Welcome to your new lab, enjoy your research, and get lots of great data!