Category: Research (Page 1 of 3)

A recent manuscript from the Nord lab and the Silverman lab at the MIND Institute is now out as a preprint on bioRxiv. This collaborative project describes phenotypes of a preclinical SYNGAP1 model including hyperactivity, deficits in learning and memory, and impairments of sleep. Other major findings include increased network firing activity, greater spikes per burst, and shorter inter-burst intervals between peaks using high density micro-electrode arrays in primary neurons.

Full preprint is available here:https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.24.550093v1

Tracy Warren’s recent co-first author manuscript is now out as a preprint on medRxiv! This collaborative project between the Nord Lab, the Carter Lab at UC Davis Medical Center, and the Sham Lab at the University of Hong Kong, assessed how polygenic risk for schizophrenia that affects different neurotransmitter pathways is associated with different symptom profiles in humans with psychotic disorders. Major findings include that subjects with increased glutamatergic risk variants tended to have more severe cognitive control symptoms, subjects with increased dopaminergic risk were better candidates for antipsychotic medication, and unsupervised clustering on subject phenotypes identified groups that differed primarily by severity of positive symptoms, negative symptoms, and cognitive symptoms. These clusters showed different profiles of genetic risk and different responsiveness to antipsychotic medication.

Check out the preprint here!
Association of neurotransmitter pathway polygenic risk with specific symptom profiles in psychosis | medRxiv

A new Nord lab paper was published in Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience on January 14th, 2019. Ayanna Wade (graduate student) is first author on the paper with Rinaldo Catta-Pretta (graduate student) and Justin Lim (technician) as co-authors. This work featuring comparative analysis of Chd8 RNA-seq and ChIP-seq datasets suggests conserved high confidence Chd8 genomic targets are related to transcriptomic pathology in Chd8 mutation and knockdown models. Find the paper here.

Dlx1 and Dlx2 in cortical interneuron generation. Read ‘Dlx1 and Dlx2 Promote Interneuron GABA Synthesis, Synaptogenesis, and Dendritogenesis’ at Cerebral Cortex here. Congratulations to all the authors!

Our work on Chd8 mouse models and the work of Guoping Feng and colleagues have been featured in Spectrum News. Read here.

Our work describing the impact of Chd8 haploinsufficiency on mouse brain development has been highlighted in this week’s edition of Science Translational Medicine. Check out the article here.

The Nord Lab’s work characterizing brain development in a mouse model of the autism risk gene Chd8 is published online in Nature Neuroscience on June 26th, 2017! Andrea Gompers (postdoc) and Linda Su-Feher (graduate student) are co-first authors from the lab. This work was a collaboration between the Nord Lab and the labs of Jacqueline Crawley and Jill Silverman (UC Davis MIND Institute), Jason Lerch (The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto), and Konstantinos Zarbalis (Shriners Hospitals for Children).

This manuscript was partially produced by copious amounts of coffee and group huddles in exasperated cafes.