QBI Seminar: Cells, genes and molecular mechanisms

Event Details

Date:

Thursday, 03 December 2015 - Thursday, 03 December 2015

Time:

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Room:

QBI Level 7 Auditorium

UQ Location:

Queensland Brain Institute (St Lucia)

URL:

http://www.qbi.uq.edu.au/neuroscience-seminars

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Professor Steve McCarroll, Director of Genetics, Broad Institute's Stanley Centre for Psychiatric Research and A/Professor, Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School

Title: Cells, genes and molecular mechanisms

Abstract:
The human brain presents some of the most interesting problems for biology, but also some of its most fundamental challenges, arising from its extreme diversity of cell types and its inviolability as a tissue for study in living individuals. As a result, our understanding of disease mechanisms, and ability to treat disorders of the brain, lags far behind our understanding of other tissues. I will first share our work to try to understand the human genome’s largest apparent influence on risk of schizophrenia, involving common genetic variation in the Major Histocompatibility Complex locus. We have worked for several years to try to find the responsible genes and alleles that give rise to this effect. This work has led us to a surprising discovery about a neuro-immune pathophysiological mechanism. I will then share our work to develop Drop-seq, a new technology for analyzing gene expression patterns in thousands of individual cells. I will describe some of the neurobiological problems to which we are now applying Drop-seq.