Neural progenitors are the foundational stem cells that create neurons and other cells within the nervous system, building the complex structures of the brain and spinal cord. Our SFB consortium is significantly advancing our understanding of these progenitors, how their fates are determined, how they respond to molecular and environmental cues, and how they persist and function into adulthood.

Kristin Tessmar-Raible‘s team is studying the circadian clock’s relationship with neural stem cells (NSCs), investigating how differences in NSCs’ circadian phase contribute to their heterogeneity and response to external cues.

Florian Raible‘s lab aims to understand the early CNS development and regeneration steps. Neural regeneration is an ancestral feature lost in humans and some other animal groups but retained in Annelids. Annelid worms modulate regenerative capacity through brain-derived factors orchestrating other developmental features.

Gaia Novarino and her team are exploring how gene mutations linked to autism affect brain stem cell behaviour using both human and mouse studies. They are investigating how mutations linked to autism can disrupt how neural stem cells multiply and create new neuronal subtypes, contributing to the development of autism spectrum disorder.

While we may think of stem cells as part of the developmental process, they persist in many tissues into adulthood. Noelia Urban‘s group studies how adult neural stem cells are regulated and how they switch between quiescence and active states. Understanding these transitions is critical as they play a crucial role in adult neurogenesis, which impacts memory, mood, and age-related disorders.

Frank Edenhofer‘s team is study neural stem cells in the context of central nervous system aging aiming to understand the molecular mechanisms that underly cellular decline in aging and neuro degenerative diseases. Frank’s lab specialise in cellular reprogramming of skin cells into induced neural stem cells. They are applying these technologies to investigate mechanisms of regeneration and repair in the brain.

Neural progenitors aren’t uniform; they comprise diverse subtypes that generate specific neuronal subtypes and glia. Work by several of our consortium researchers is contributing to our knowledge of the diversity of neuronal progenitor subtypes and how extrinsic factors influence their specification.

Anna Kicheva‘s lab studies how morphogen signalling controls pattern formation and tissue growth in the developing spinal cord. The early developing spinal cord is an epithelial tissue of multiple neural progenitor subtypes organised in a precise spatial pattern. This pattern forms in response to signalling molecules called morphogens, which are produced at the opposite poles of the tissue and form gradients of activity across the tissue.

Elly Tanaka‘s team is studying the temporal dynamics of self-organised spinal cord patterning. Their research aims to understand how progenitor cells in the developing spinal cord are influenced to generate the right cells at the right time.

Igor Adameyko‘s group investigate cell fate selection in neural progenitor cells. They use Neural crest cells as a model to study how neural progenitors determine the proportions and subtypes of their differentiating progeny while achieving balanced fate outcomes and controlling structure size.

Simon Hippenmeyer‘s team studies neural stem cell lineage progression and fate determination using MADAM in combination with single-cell RNA sequencing. This work provides key insights into molecular mechanisms that control neural stem cell dates.

Neural differentiation is the process by which neural progenitors give rise to diverse, specialized cell types in the nervous system. This process involves a complex interplay of genetic and environmental cues that influence cell fate. Making the right cells at the right place at the right time is critical for a functioning central nervous system. Understanding neural differentiation is crucial for unravelling the mechanisms of brain development, function, and disease.

Jürgen Knoblich‘s lab studies neural differentiation using organoids – tiny 3D models of human organs grown in the lab from stem cells. Their groundbreaking work has focused on creating human brain organoids that allow them to model how the human brain develops and what goes wrong in conditions like microcephaly and autism.

Sofia Grade‘s group investigates neural differentiation in the context of regeneration: How does the brain respond to injury to make new cells? How do these cells integrate into the existing neural architecture? Understanding this process is critical for our understanding of brain injuries and a potential route to generating treatments for patients with brain injuries following trauma, strokes or neurodegenerative disease.

Neuronal connections are vital for brain information processing, playing a role in everything from cognition and memory to locomotion and behavior. Understanding how these circuits form and develop over time may give us key insights into many different neurological diseases and disorders.

Lora Sweeney‘s team is interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms of how neural circuits form. Their lab uses the Xenopus frog to understand the neural circuits of the spinal cord and how they regulate particular movement behaviours. This system has unique advantages in studying this problem, as during metamorphosis, from tadpole to frog, the neural circuitry must remodel to change from swimming to walking movements.