Exeter Postdoc Appreciation Week - Fri Seminar

We aim to establish a trajectory of genomic regulatory mechanisms, DNA methylation and Chromatin acetylation, throughout neurodevelopment, using post-mortem fetal, childhood and adult brain tissue. Our group established a novel technique for isolating nuclei from frozen tissue and enriching for specific cell populations through FANS. We identified a new marker to be used in fetal tissue assays, purifying a comparative population to adult neural cells. Our data shows differential gene regulation across developmental periods, which will facilitate our studies into psychiatric disorder aetiology.

Microglia are the immune cells of the central nervous system and are responsible for mediating neuroinflammation in both health and disease. My research focuses on the bidirectional relationship between microglia and neurons within the brain, specifically the effects of coordinated neuronal network activity on microglia activation.

Interactions between different parts of the brain underlie cognitive functions such as working memory and are strongly implicated in many diseases. Long range projections have been studied extensively, yet the cellular specificity of these connections remains unclear. We use a an optogenetic circuit-mapping approach in mice. Our results show that some pathways are highly selective for inhibitory interneurons, and either avoid or only sparsely target principal cells and this can vary drastically between regions.