Developmental origins of neural diversity

Research aim

What mechanisms generate the brain’s thousands of cell types? We investigate the emergence of cellular diversity in the mammalian brain, with the ultimate goal of understanding how these processes interact with neurological disease.

About us

In the last several years, new single-cell genomic methods have transformed our understanding of the mammalian brain, revealing extraordinary cellular diversity. Recent work including our own indicates the brain contains thousands of cell types. Both neurons and glia exhibit extensive region-specific variation. Strikingly, these cell types appear to reflect their developmental origins. Developmental processes clearly have a lasting impact on the brain and play critical roles in genetic predisposition to disease.

Our group seeks to understand the emergence of neural diversity. We’re particularly interested in differences between the cortex and the brainstem. Our data reveal an especially high number of cell types in the brainstem, which underlies some of our most essential functions, playing a central role in neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disease. We ask questions like:
• How do cell types in the brainstem diversify?
• How do these processes interact with genetic mutations?
• How does the human brain innovate on these processes?

We approach these questions with mouse models and high-throughput genomic technologies. Brain development is a complex process involving the generation and migration of many cells that are rapidly changing and communicating with one another. Single-cell methods have the potential to disentangle these processes, infer their interactions with genetic mutations, and explore how these forces have changed over the course of evolution.