Professor Gordon Fishell, Harvard University: "Making up your mind, the specification and integration of interneurons into the cortex"
Speaker:
Professor Gordon Fishell
Professor of Neurobiology
Harvard Medical School and the Stanley Center at the Broad
220 Longwood Ave. MA 02115, USA
Title: "Making up your mind, the specification and integration of interneurons into the cortex"
Abstract: My talk will be focused on two complementary aspects of cortical interneuron development. Firstly, from a developmental genetics vantage we are examining the trajectories by which cortical interneurons are generated from their anlage, the three ganglionic eminences, the medial, lateral and caudal ganglionic eminences. Historically, this has involved fate mapping these progenitor zones (Wichterle et al., 2001; Nery et al., 2003, Butt et al., 2005, Miyoshi et al., 2007, 2010). More recently this work has been complemented by single cell RNA-seq analysis (Mayer et al., in preparation) demonstrating the underlying logic by which interneuron and projection neurons are specified during development.
Secondly, the laboratory has increasing intrigued by postnatal events by which cortical interneurons become integrated into brain circuits. Beginning with the recognition that modulation of activity can affect both the migration and morphological development of interneurons (De Marco et al., 2011), the laboratory has become interested in the connection between activity, gene expression (Demarco et al., 2015) and alternative splicing (Wamsley et al., 2018). I will discuss recent evidence indicating that the splice factors Nova1 and Nova2 direct synaptogenesis in response to activity mediated splicing.
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