신경 후성유전체 연구실

My lab is interested in understanding how sensory experience can be accurately translated into neuronal and behavioral plasticity through genetic and epigenetic regulation. Sensory experience-evoked neural activity plays essential roles in brain development and cognition, not only by instructing structural and functional changes in individual synapses, but also by triggering various calcium-dependent signaling cascades which ultimately lead to the activation of specific gene expression programs in the nucleus. This activity-induced nuclear gene expression is the cell-wide adaptation mechanism that permits the synaptic and behavioral plasticity to be long lasting. The function of activity-dependent gene regulation is especially well established for learning and memory. Many key players in these programs have been implicated in several human neurological disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Epilepsy, and Schizophrenia. Our overarching goal is to advance our understanding of the pathophysiology of various neurological disorders by defining new regulatory mechanisms and molecular players in genetic and epigenetic regulatory networks in the brain.