Andreas will present the lab’s latest work on Alzheimer’s at the Project Olympus Show & Tell event April 20th. Show & Tell is an annual series during Spring Carnival to highlight the work of students and faculty across CMU, and connect them to the wider entrepreneurial community. Andreas’s talk will focus on “Translating genetic findings into new therapies for Alzheimer’s disease.”
This Sunday, Andreas will be interviewed along with the author of a new book on a family with a strongly inherited form of AD. The segment will air on 3/12 at 11:30AM EST on the local CBS affiliate (KDKA). The interview will be part of KDPG Sunday Edition, a report which “features updates on current events …
We’re happy to announce the lab will join nine other labs in the Collaboration to Infer Regulatory Circuits and to Uncover Innovative Therapeutic Strategies (CIRCUITS), a new initiative to translate genetic findings into therapies for Alzheimer’s disease. We’ll be combining computational and experimental techniques to study how genetic variation in enhancer regions influences Alzheimer’s disease predisposition. …
Andreas was one of nine recipients of an Okawa Foundation Research Grant in Computer Science. He accepted the award at a ceremony in San Francisco.
This week, Morgan Wirthlin officially joins the lab. She starts as a postdoc and BrainHub fellow, hailing from Portland, OR. For more insight, check out her interview on the CBD facebook page.
The first shipments are in, and first experiments under way. While there is more set-up to be done, the wet lab is coming together. All is on track to welcome Morgan next month.
Today, a friend and collaborator of the Neurogenomics laboratory, Christin Glorioso, published an article in eLIFE about the state of science funding and academia as whole. She and her coauthors argue that the decrease in federal grant funding coupled with an increase in average age of grant recipients is pushing some of the best minds away from …
With the semester wrapping up, the undergraduate students in the lab presented their research projects. They have been doing innovative work on a range of topics, from the evolution of regulatory regions to mechanisms of aging/Alzheimer’s disease. Congrats to them on a great semester!
Lab manager, Ashley Brown, and research assistant, John Apostolides, are hitting the ground running after starting this spring. Currently, they are starting first experiments while continuing to set up the laboratory space in Mellon and maintain the website. Ashley, the virus guru, is bringing her extensive training in molecular biology to get the lab up …
“Each cell in your body has the same DNA, but they don’t all follow the same instructions. Some become blood cells; others become brain cells or muscle tissue. But if the DNA has a mistake or the cells turn on the wrong set of genes, that can lead to disease. So how do cells decide …
“Our results show that functional conservation between human and mouse is not restricted to protein-coding genes,” says Andreas Pfenning, joint first author of the study and a postdoc at MIT. “This opens up the use of epigenomics methods in model organisms to study an inaccessible organ like the brain, and how it changes in response …
“‘By studying the epigenomes of cells, we come to learn about how they became what they are,’ says Christopher Glass, a genomics scientist at UC San Diego who was not involved in the work. And unlike a person’s genome sequence, the epigenome can readily change in response to diet, disease, and environment factors, allowing cells—and …
“THERE is not much point in being multicellular if all your cells are the same. It is division of labour and specialisation of cell function which gives animals and plants their edge in the struggle for life. How that specialisation comes about, though, is understood only hazily. Most cells in any given body have the …
“Several studies in the Nature family journals are offering a look at results from the National Institutes of Health’s Roadmap Epigenomics Consortium, an NIH Common Fund-supported effort to untangle regulatory features in human cells.” View more …
“More than 200 scientists working on an ambitious federal project have begun to understand the complicated system of switches that regulates genes, turning some on and others off, making some glow brightly while others dim. They hope these discoveries, described in two dozen papers released on Wednesday, will eventually lead to a deeper understanding of diseases …
“Boston scientists have developed a technique that can trace a cancer cell back to the tissue where it started, raising hope for one day improving treatment for mysterious cancers of unknown origin.” View more …
“If asked to make a comparison, most people would say that a human baby is more like a monkey than a songbird. But, when it comes to the ability to make sounds, we share more with songbirds than with our primate cousins …” View more …
“‘Studying fine motor behavior is vital for a lot of neurological disorders in humans, but traditional research subjects like mice are difficult to quantify for those kinds of actions,’ says Pfenning. ‘With birdsong, meanwhile, there are far more exact metrics, like the precision of the pitch, the timing/rhythm of the notes and even the higher-level …
“With chicks that have claws on their wings and a digestive system that resembles a cow’s, the pheasantsized hoatzin that roams the Amazon has always puzzled those trying to place it within the avian family tree. But now researchers believe they have pinned down the odd bird’s relatives—just one of the many findings revealed this …
“Scientists have produced a new family tree for nearly all species of birds alive today, drawing on a massive DNA analysis to gain insights into evolutionary history.” View more …
Neurogenomics Laboratory